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 (forthcoming 2019). My English edition of Foucault’s 1983 Berkeley seminars, Discourse and Truth, will appear in May 2019.

More recently, I have begun work on a second monograph, Staging the Political: Colonial Encounters in North Africa and France that examines the entangled political, economic, and intellectual relationships that bound France and its colonies between 1947 and 1962. Drawing on the work of Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Alioune Diop, Léopold Senghor, Édouard Glissant and others, I analyze a range of speech contexts, from the psychiatric clinics at Blida and Charles-Nicolle, to Tropiques and Présence Africaine, and the sites of anti-colonial postwar politics. Might this political moment (and others like it) be transformative of the institutions, relationships, and concepts through which peoples come to understand what their politics is and can be?