Nancy Luxon

University of Minnesota, Political Science

My work in contemporary political and social theory concentrates on questions of power, authority, and truth-telling. Three interconnected themes animate my research agenda: questions of subjectivity and power, particularly as raised by Michel Foucault; the resources of clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis for analyzing moments of political change; and the relationship between political theory and literary theories of narrative. I came to these themes from a preoccupation with those practices that organize the interstices of political spaces – namely, the spaces between personal and political practices, between political conditions of possibility and psychic interiority, and between past and future. Within these speech contexts, the conditions for power and agency are simultaneously most at risk and most in play. In analyzing these practices, my research consistently seeks to understand vulnerability and agency alongside of, rather than in opposition to, one another. These concepts and themes run consistently through my work, as it moves from the psychoanalytic couch, to the prison in protest, or within colonial regimes and their emergent counter-publics.

My work has been published in Inquiry, Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, PS, and Perspectives, with essays also in Review of Politics and materiali foucaultiani. My first book, Crisis of Authority (2013), considers political authority as a process in which individuals learn to author themselves, and so come to engage differently in political contest. I have also edited a translation of Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault's Disorderly Families (2017), along with a companion scholarly volume, Archives of Infamy (2019). My English edition of Foucault’s 1983 Berkeley seminars, Discourse and Truth, appeared in May 2019.

More recently, I have begun work on a second monograph, Alienation, Disalienation, and Freedom that examines the intersection of psychology and politics that characterized antifascistic politics in the 1930s. A range of thinkers, from François Tosquelles, to Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, Jean Oury, and (surprisingly) Michel Foucault turned to the psychiatric clinic to rethink the sociability possible in crisis times. I argue that they take up a shared infrastructural project: that of breathing life into and giving form to the social mediations that thread through and organize a lifeworld, a vécu. In so doing, the relationship between clinical and political spaces became more frictive and experimental. New questions emerged: how might patients differently orient themselves to social context rather than personal history?  And in what ways could these waystations do more than acclimate patients to the hierarchies of existing institutions?