Thomas Nail

This paper contributes to the idea of “marine materialism.” Specifically, I argue that the marine drama of the sun moving over the sea sheds light on the human act of knowing as a performative and material process. I do not argue that we should think of the sea as a metaphor, simile, analogy, or metonym for human knowledge. Instead, I want to show that the connection between ontology, epistemology, and the marine drama is a relation of scale. That is, I want to show that the marine drama iteratively performs in its own way what human knowledge and the cosmos do at different scales. I do this through a close reading of the first three stanzas of the French poet Paul Valéry’s, poem “Le Cimetière marin” (“The Marine Cemetery”).

The concept of assemblage plays a crucial role in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In a 1980 interview with Catherine Clément, Deleuze describes their invention of the concept of the assemblage as the “general logic” at work in A Thousand Plateaus. However, despite its thirty years of influence on political theory, this “general logic of the assemblage” still remains obscured by the fact that Deleuze and Guattari never formalized it as a theory per se, but largely used it ad hoc throughout their work. This fact continues to pose problems for theorists today who wish to deploy something like a theory of assemblages, but also admit, as Manuel DeLanda does, that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of...

Deleuze and Foucault had a long, complicated and productive relationship, in which each was at various times a significant influence on the other. This collection combines 3 original essays by Deleuze and Foucault, in which they respond to each other's work, with 16 critical essays by key contemporary scholars working in the field. The result is a sustained discussion and analysis of the various dimensions of this fascinating relationship, which clarifies the implications of their philosophical encounter.

The Most Original and Shocking Interpretation of Lucretius in the Last Forty Years, After centuries of abuse by modern atomists and mechanistic materialists, Thomas Nail argues that it is now time to return to De Rerum Natura from the perspective of a new materialism. Nail shows that some of the most important contributions of Lucretius' poem have been completely overlooked or misunderstood. He reinterprets this classical text as an absolutely contemporary one defined by motion and gives us a genuinely new Lucretius - a Lucretius for today. Book jacket.

This book offers a much-needed new political theory of an old phenomenon. The last decade alone has marked the highest number of migrations in recorded history. Constrained by environmental, economic, and political instability, scores of people are on the move. But other sorts of changes—from global tourism to undocumented labor—have led to the fact that to some extent, we are all becoming migrants. The migrant has become the political figure of our time. Rather than viewing migration as the exception to the rule of political fixity and citizenship, Thomas Nail reinterprets the history of political power from the perspective of the movement that defines the migrant in the first place. Applying his "kinopolitics" to several major historical conditions and figures of migration, he provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary migration.

This paper draws on the work of Michel Foucault in order to analyze the constellation of political strategies and power at the US/Mexico border wall. These strategies, however, are incredibly diverse and often directly antagonistic of one another. Thus, this paper argues that in order to make sense of the seemingly multiple and contradictory political strategies deployed in the operation of the US/Mexico border wall, we have to understand the coexistence and intertwinement of at least three distinct types of power at work there: the sovereign exclusion of illegal life, the disciplinary detention of surveilled life, and the biopolitical circulation of migratory life. By doing so this paper offers an original contribution to two major areas of study: in Foucault studies this paper expands the existing literature on Foucault by analyzing the crossroads of power particular to the US/Mexico border wall, which has not yet been done, and in border studies this Foucauldian approach offers a unique political analysis that goes beyond the critique of sovereignty and toward an analysis of coexisting strategies of power

This paper is an attempt to explicate the relationship between Spinozist expressionism and philosophical constructivism in Deleuze's work through the concept of immanent causality. Deleuze finds in Spinoza a philosophy of immanent causality used to solve the problem of the relation between substance, attribute and mode as an expression of substance. But, when he proceeds to take up this notion of immanent causality found in Spinoza in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze instead inverts it into a modal one such that the identity of substance may be said only of the difference of the modes. Complicating this further, Deleuze and Guattari claim in A Thousand Plateaus that substance, attribute, and mode are each, themselves, multiplicities. What is Philosophy? takes up immanent causality once again, this time through a constructivist lens aimed at resolving the question of the relation between philosophical multiplicities: ‘plane,’ ‘persona,’ and ‘concept.’ By following the different formulations of immanent causality in these works this essay hopes to discover the relationship between Spinozist expressionism and philosophical constructivism in Deleuze's work

This paper argues that borders and violence against migrants no longer takes place exclusively at the geographical space between two sovereign territories. Instead border violence today has become much more normalized and diffused into society itself. An entire privatized industry now capitalizes on the cycle of transporting, incarcerating, hiring, and releasing non-status migrants. Similarly, however, resistance to this violence is also shifting from the older confrontation with sovereignty and the demands for rights to the larger aim of making the non-status migrant or nomad the new figure of political belonging and solidarity: demanding equality for all, regardless of status.

The rising number of non-status migrants is one of the central political issues of our time. This essay argues that if we want to understand the political and philosophical importance of this phenomenon, the contributions of Alain Badiou, his militant group L'Organisation politique, and the struggle of the sans-papiers movement in France are absolutely crucial. This is the case because, I will argue, Badiou, the OP, and the sans-papiers created a new kind of migrant justice struggle in the mid-1990s that in many ways remains at the practical and theoretical roots of much of non-status migrant organizing today. However, this essay also argues that Badiou's theoretical and political work with the sans-papiers also needs to be revised and updated in light of certain developments in more recent migrant justice struggles