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Empiricism and film theory : on the Moviola's political ontologyIn Kyle Stevens (ed.), The Oxford handbook of film theory, Oxford University Press. 2022.
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32The Sacredness of Life and Death: Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer and the Tasks of Political ThinkingTheory and Event 3 (1). 1999.
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70Why film matters to political theoryContemporary Political Theory 12 (1): 2-25. 2013.In this article, I claim that film matters to political theory not because of the stories films recount, but because the medium of film offers political theorists an image of political thinking that emphasizes the stochastic serialization of actions. I thus argue that the stochastic serialization of moving images that films project makes available for democratic theory an experience of resistance and change as a felt discontinuity of succession, rather than as an inversion of hierarchical power.…Read more
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17The Poetics of Political ThinkingDuke University Press. 2006.In _The Poetics of Political Thinking_ Davide Panagia focuses on the role that aesthetic sensibilities play in theorists’ evaluations of political arguments. Examining works by thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to Jacques Rancière, Panagia shows how each one invokes aesthetic concepts and devices, such as metaphor, mimesis, imagination, beauty, and the sublime. He argues that it is important to recognize and acknowledge these poetic forms of representation because they provide evaluative standards tha…Read more
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5“words Cloth'd In Reason's Garb”: Stanley Fish's Aesthetics and PoliticsPhilosophy Today 31 (5): 720-733. 2003.
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27The political life of sensationDuke University Press. 2009.Prologue : narratocracy and the contours of political life -- From nomos to nomad : Kant, Deleuze, and Rancière on sensation -- The piazza, the edicola, and the noise of the utterance -- Machiavelli's theory of sensation and Florence's vita festiva -- The viewing subject : Caravaggio, Bacon, and the ring -- "You're eating too fast!" slow food's ethos of convivium -- Epilogue : "the photographs tell it all" : on an ethics of appearance.
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6Review: "Words Cloth'd in Reasons Garb": Stanley Fish's Aesthetics and Politics (review)Political Theory 31 (5). 2003.
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Images of Political Thought: Judgment, Opinion, and PoliticsDissertation, The Johns Hopkins University. 2002.This dissertation inquires into contemporary accounts of the nature of political argument by focusing on the following question: What do contemporary political theorists require of individuals when asked to think politically? Looking to selected writings of John Rawls, Gilles Deleuze, Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Ranciere, and others, I examine how these theorists understand the activity of thinking and consider how their views on the function of thinking inform their contending conceptions of polit…Read more
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18Rita Felski. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 232 pp (review)Critical Inquiry 42 (4): 995-996. 2016.
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13Intermedial Relations: A Critique of Reification TheorySubstance 46 (1): 90-110. 2017.The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation. I begin with an epigraph from Adam Smith in order to make apparent the structuring conceit of this essay, which is the following: the matter of assemblages are here considered within the context of modern tradition of moral sentimentalism and its considerations of the affective, associational d…Read more
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29Rancière, Jacques. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. Trans., Zakir Paul. London: Verso, 2013. $29.95. 304 pp (review)Critical Inquiry 41 (2): 464-465. 2015.
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126The Force of Political ArgumentPhilosophy Today 32 (6): 825-848. 2004.In this essay, the author examines the tensions that emerge between the practice of essay writing and a commitment to philosophical justification as themodel for political argument in contemporary political thought. He focuses on Jürgen Habermas’s adoption of the performative contradiction as an ideal for communicative exchange and shows the unacknowledged role that sincerity plays in Habermas’s argument. He then links this account to his explorations of the rise of aesthetic criticism in the ei…Read more
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30On the Possibilities of a Political Theory of AlgorithmsPolitical Theory 49 (1): 109-133. 2021.This essay asks how we might articulate a political theory of algorithms. To do so, I propose a political ontology of the algorithm dispositif that elaborates how algorithms arrange the movement of energies in space and time, and how they do so automatically. This force of arrangement is what I refer to as the dispositional power of algorithms that I identify as a political physics of vital processes. The essay is divided into three sections. The first provides readers of Political Theory with a…Read more
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3Rancières SentimentsDuke University Press. 2018.In _Rancière’s Sentiments _Davide Panagia explores Jacques Rancière’s aesthetics of politics as it informs his radical democratic theory of participation. Attending to diverse practices of everyday living and doing—of form, style, and scenography—in Rancière’s writings, Panagia characterizes Rancière as a sentimental thinker for whom the aesthetic is indistinguishable from the political. Rather than providing prescriptions for political judgment and action, Rancière focuses on how sensibilities …Read more
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5Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of DiscontinuityRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2012.Davide Panagia’s Impressions of Hume: Cinematic Thinking and the Politics of Discontinuity is volume fifteen of Modernity and Political Thought, the Rowman & Littlefield series in contemporary political theory