Project MUSE®: Theory & Event - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Theory & Event.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1997) through current issueLatest Articles: Theory & EventTWOProject MUSE®Theory & Event1092-311X2572-6633Latest articles in Theory & Event. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editors’ Introduction to the April 2026 Issue
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986556
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We were saddened to hear of the death of Bill Connolly on February 25. Among his many contributions to political theory, Bill was one of the founders of Theory & Event and our community will greatly miss him. His “An Ecology of Non-Human Modes of Production” was already slated to be published in this issue when we learned of his passing. We invited Mike Shapiro, another co-founder of Theory & Event who worked closely with Bill, to preface the article with a personal reflection and words of goodbye. These words, followed by Bill’s article, open this issue.In “An Ecology of Non-Human Modes of Production,” Connolly expands the Marxist understanding of production to non-human forces and agents. This is not an exercise
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191/image/coversmallEditors’ Introduction to the April 2026 Issue2026-04-03text/htmlen-USEditors’ Introduction to the April 2026 Issue2026-04-032026TWOProject MUSE®114542026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-03The Connolly Effect
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986557
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I want to trace Bill Connolly’s role in the founding of Theory & Event by beginning in 1984 with his participation at a University of Iowa Humanities symposium on the Rhetoric of the Human Sciences where he, I and a few other political theorists presented papers along with scholars from several other disciplines: anthropology, communication, economics, history, journalism, philosophy. In attendance was an editor from the University of Wisconsin Press who signed several of us to book contracts for a series that adopted the title of the conference. Bill’s Politics and Ambiguity (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987) in which he makes a case for the importance of ambiguity, is one of them. I want to quote a key passage
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191/image/coversmallThe Connolly Effect2026-04-03text/htmlen-USThe Connolly Effect2026-04-032026TWOProject MUSE®56472026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-03An Ecology of Nonhuman Modes of Production
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986558
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I am going to try an experiment, partly inspired by one theme in Anti-Oedipus, a book composed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in the 1970s. Inspired, even more, by recent work in earth sciences such as oceanography, climatology, virology, geology, and glaciology. If it works it may identify a problematic complementarity between (classical) Marxism, Keynesianism and neoliberalism across their significant differences. It may also underline some of the costs paid so far, mostly in nontemperate zones but in temperate zone states too, for the fact that capitalist state social scientists and humanists remained too long stuck in both sociocentrism—the idea that the basic causes of social change are all internal to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191/image/coversmallAn Ecology of Nonhuman Modes of Production2026-04-03text/htmlen-USAn Ecology of Nonhuman Modes of Production2026-04-032026TWOProject MUSE®617782026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-03Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, a Second Red Scare Text for our Third Red Scare Moment
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986559
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Dedicated to William E. Connolly, with whom I wish I could have discussed these mattersIn 2017, Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) became an improbable bestseller when, after the 2016 election, people looked to Arendt for guidance in halting the advance of aspirational fascism in the US.1 This short essay argues for the importance, now, of a different book by Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). The book has been treated as part of her “Jewish Writings,” a philosophical study of the nature of evil, and a contribution to legal studies. But it has yet to be read in connection with America’s Second Red Scare, which arguably shaped Arendt’s analysis of the trial as she
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191/image/coversmallArendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, a Second Red Scare Text for our Third Red Scare Moment2026-04-03text/htmlen-USArendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, a Second Red Scare Text for our Third Red Scare Moment2026-04-032026TWOProject MUSE®279872026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-03The Uses of Tentacularity: Towards a Kraken Theory for Earthly Survival
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986560
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Thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort.Theory survives. All declarations of its demise notwithstanding, theory, as John Mowitt puts it, “stubbornly survives its death.”2 If theory, put simply, means a more or less systematic reflection on ourselves and the world, then it will always remain indispensable. It cannot ever really die. Yet, that being said, it is of course also true that we can very well identify different cycles, constellations or—to already use a term I will speak about in more detail shortly—conjunctures of theory. When, in his 2003 book After Theory, Terry Eagleton claimed that “[t]he golden age of cultural theory is long past,”3 I believe he was at the same time right and wrong. For it was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191/image/coversmallThe Uses of Tentacularity: Towards a Kraken Theory for Earthly Survival2026-04-03text/htmlen-USThe Uses of Tentacularity: Towards a Kraken Theory for Earthly Survival2026-04-032026TWOProject MUSE®953022026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-03“What Is It You Want to Learn?”: Somatic Awareness in the Tradition of Elsa Gindler
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986561
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In 1934, Marcel Mauss published “Techniques of the Body,” in which he analyzed the education of the body as a form of power:The child, the adult, imitates actions that have succeeded, which he has seen successfully performed by people in whom he has confidence and who have power over him. The action is imposed from without, from above, even if it is an exclusively biological action, involving his body. The individual borrows the series of movements of which he is composed from the action executed in front of him, or with him, by others.It is precisely this notion of the prestige of the person who performs the ordered, authorized, tested action vis-à-vis the imitating individual, that contains all the social
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191/image/coversmall“What Is It You Want to Learn?”: Somatic Awareness in the Tradition of Elsa Gindler2026-04-03text/htmlen-US“What Is It You Want to Learn?”: Somatic Awareness in the Tradition of Elsa Gindler2026-04-032026TWOProject MUSE®1080142026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-03Sun, Steel, and Raw Eggs: The Far-right Politics of the Male Body
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986562
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The screen plays a montage of muscular young men, exercising in a coordinated rhythm. A stern voice-over tells the viewer that this scene is now a thing of the past. The present is instead a time of soft bodies, produced by a sedentary lifestyle. The scene comes from the documentary (The End of Men) produced by the conservative media personality, Tucker Carlson. As the film proceeds it illustrates this verdict with a set of examples demonstrating the threats that supposedly face the nation. As the narrator argues, “surrounded by the wealth and comfort they [contemporary Americans] have won, they lose their life force. They become confused and isolated. They lose faith in themselves, and the civilization they’ve
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191/image/coversmallSun, Steel, and Raw Eggs: The Far-right Politics of the Male Body2026-04-03text/htmlen-USSun, Steel, and Raw Eggs: The Far-right Politics of the Male Body2026-04-032026TWOProject MUSE®1117012026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-03How to Do More-Than-Human Politics: Towards an Ecocentric Model of Democratic Representation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986563
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“Grow ears on the bottom of your feet.”Not the sort of instruction you expect at a workshop on environmental politics. But there it was—spoken aloud, offered without irony—as if the feet might know something the mouth does not. And we listened. Through contact, through posture, through a kind of reverent absurdity. Not just to each other, but to the ground. To worms. To wind. To something more entangled—at once near and far, present and absent.It was May 2022, in Copenhagen. We were fifty or so human beings from many walks of life—students, artists, scholars, activists, private citizens— gathered not to elect delegates or draft resolutions, but to explore, with and on our own bodies, what it might mean to found a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191/image/coversmallHow to Do More-Than-Human Politics: Towards an Ecocentric Model of Democratic Representation2026-04-03text/htmlen-USHow to Do More-Than-Human Politics: Towards an Ecocentric Model of Democratic Representation2026-04-032026TWOProject MUSE®990452026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-03Zoometrics and the Dogs of Gaza: Species, Race, and Settler-Colonial Violence
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986564
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We are fighting animal-humans (“hayot-adam”), and we are acting accordingly.A couple of days after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the Israeli Defense Minister depicted Gazans as hayot-adam—Hebrew for animal-humans.2 This rhetoric exemplifies what my article’s focus on zoometrics seeks to name: The calibration of humanness and animality as a settler technology. Soon after the statement was released, the Israeli media circulated images of Israeli soldiers rescuing dogs and cats from the rubble of Palestinian homes they had just bombed in Gaza. No similar images circulated that depicted Israeli soldiers digging Palestinian children out of the rubble.But animal representations do not merely degrade, or
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191/image/coversmallZoometrics and the Dogs of Gaza: Species, Race, and Settler-Colonial Violence2026-04-03text/htmlen-USZoometrics and the Dogs of Gaza: Species, Race, and Settler-Colonial Violence2026-04-032026TWOProject MUSE®1376212026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-03Preface to the 2024 Neal A. Maxwell Lecture in Political Theory and Contemporary Politics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986565
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Michaele Ferguson delivered the 2024 Neal Maxwell Lecture in Political Theory and Contemporary Politics. Ferguson’s essay is situated in the present moment of antifeminist backlash in the United States. Ferguson contends that while there is a great deal of outrage about gendered oppression—at the Dobbs decision crushing reproductive freedom, at the widespread capitulation of academia to right-wing assaults on feminist institutions and scholarship, for example—there has been a general failure to translate this outrage into effective, sustained political organizing and action. In part, this is a question of political imagination—or the lack thereof. Ferguson argues that too many feminists understand feminism in terms
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191/image/coversmallPreface to the 2024 Neal A. Maxwell Lecture in Political Theory and Contemporary Politics2026-04-03text/htmlen-USPreface to the 2024 Neal A. Maxwell Lecture in Political Theory and Contemporary Politics2026-04-032026TWOProject MUSE®36972026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-03Organizing Feminism: Towards Centering the CWLU in Feminist Political Imagination
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986566
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In the past few years, many feminists in the United States have expressed shock and disbelief as the institutional power of the state has been turned against them. When the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decision overturned Roe v. Wade, they were stunned that a longstanding precedent they had taken for granted could simply be overruled. Some feminists have responded by trying to recapture the state through supporting pro-reproductive freedom candidates at the federal and state levels, and working to alter state-level legislation and constitutions to guarantee continued, legal access to abortion care. These efforts paid off in the 2022 midterm elections but failed to produce similar results in 2024. While seven
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191/image/coversmallOrganizing Feminism: Towards Centering the CWLU in Feminist Political Imagination2026-04-03text/htmlen-USOrganizing Feminism: Towards Centering the CWLU in Feminist Political Imagination2026-04-032026TWOProject MUSE®1661752026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-03Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love by Lida Maxwell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986567
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Although Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring is often credited with launching the twentieth-century American environmental movement, political theorists have had remarkably little to say about her work. Lida Maxwell’s Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love seeks to rectify that omission—while also showing us another side of Carson altogether, one brought out by her relationship to her dearest friend Dorothy Freeman, facilitated by their time spent together in the more-than-human world.Even those who know about Carson’s close relationship to Freeman will likely be surprised by the startlingly tender, even shockingly intimate tenor of their correspondence: Theirs are undoubtedly love letters. In reading them
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191/image/coversmallRachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love by Lida Maxwell (review)2026-04-03text/htmlen-USRachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love by Lida Maxwell (review)2026-04-032026TWOProject MUSE®97732026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-03Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature by Alyssa Battistoni (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986568
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In November, countries of the world (with a few notable omissions) gathered in Brazil for the latest iteration of the perpetually disappointing spectacle that has become the global climate talks. As debates over fossil fuel phase-outs and just transition mechanisms dominated the proceedings, visions of carbon markets danced in the heads of many delegates and lobbyists. This year’s talks in Belém saw the emergence of an “Open Coalition on Compliance Carbon Markets,” supported by eighteen countries including Brazil, China and the EU, seeking to create uniform standards across the hodge-podge of national and subnational carbon pricing systems that already exist.This effort to construct a global carbon market is both a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191/image/coversmallFree Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature by Alyssa Battistoni (review)2026-04-03text/htmlen-USFree Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature by Alyssa Battistoni (review)2026-04-032026TWOProject MUSE®125062026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-03The Smoke and the Spoils: Anti-Environmentalism and Class Struggle in the United States by John Hultgren (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986569
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In our current political moment, it sometimes seems as if fighting climate change has become almost impossible. In the face of immediate dangers—like militarized terror being inflicted on our neighbors in the form of regular ICE raids, large-scale illegal federal layoffs, attacks on higher education and free speech, and the war against the trans community—it may seem challenging to hold on to the importance of climate politics. Demanding a Green New Deal, or large-scale federal action to shift to renewable energy, seems so far away from our current moment, where shifts to renewable energy are suddenly being discouraged and saving floundering coal and other extractive industries is now being subsidized by the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191/image/coversmallThe Smoke and the Spoils: Anti-Environmentalism and Class Struggle in the United States by John Hultgren (review)2026-04-03text/htmlen-USThe Smoke and the Spoils: Anti-Environmentalism and Class Struggle in the United States by John Hultgren (review)2026-04-032026TWOProject MUSE®120972026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-03Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking by Yuk Hui (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986570
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Our planetary condition is shaped by technological globalization, yet it lacks a corresponding planetary thinking capable of representing this new reality. While fragments of such thinking can be traced in eighteenth- and twentieth-century French and German philosophy, its genuine development depends on an open-ended and still unrealized entanglement of life, knowledge, cosmology, and technological infrastructure.This is the grand thesis of Yuk Hui’s Machine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking (2024). If humanity fails to cultivate planetary thinking, Hui warns, ecological, political, and social disasters will intensify—through both unfolding catastrophes and the homogenizing force of global capitalism.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191/image/coversmallMachine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking by Yuk Hui (review)2026-04-03text/htmlen-USMachine and Sovereignty: For a Planetary Thinking by Yuk Hui (review)2026-04-032026TWOProject MUSE®124002026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-03Biographies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986571
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Irus Braverman is SUNY distinguished professor, Teresa A. Miller professor of law, adjunct professor of geography, and research professor at the Department of Research and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. Braverman’s research explores the intersection of nature and politics. Her most recent book, Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), received the Clay Morgan award for Best Book in Environmental Political Theory from the Western Political Science Association. For more information, check out her website at https://www.irusbraverman.org/.William E. Connolly was Krieger-Eisenhower Professor emeritus at Johns
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/191/image/coversmallBiographies2026-04-03text/htmlen-USBiographies2026-04-032026TWOProject MUSE®82572026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-04-03