Kevin Inston
Biographic Data
| ID | 1032812 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kevin Inston |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kevin |
| FAMILY NAME | Inston |
| SIGNATURE | INSTON K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3111-4652 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Rethinking the Politics of Belonging
Making Sense of Property with Jean-Jacques Rousseau
This article argues that property is contingent, for Rousseau, being enacted through appropriation which creates a boundary that encloses something as owned while exposing it to others free to respect or reject ownership. It is proper neither to the individual nor to community but constituted through their articulation. This emphasis on relationality differentiates Rousseau’s theory from Locke’s. The self-enclosure of possessive individualism wou…
Sense, Orientation, and World Creation
This article stages a dialogue between Jean-Luc Nancy’s postphenomenology and Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology to examine the conditions, ethos, and politics of world creation as well as the habits, obstacles, and inequalities that resist it. It argues that Nancy’s understanding of sense as the event of the mutual exposure of bodies reveals what exceeds dominant worldviews, how bodies extend the world beyond prevailing spatializations, but that i…
Improper communities in the work of Roberto Esposito and Jacques Rancière
Chantal Mouffe
The Human-Animal Relation in Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality
The Discourse on Inequality disputes the human-animal hierarchy in its denunciation of social inequality as unnatural. Stripping away social artifice, it reveals a deep physical continuity between man and animals. As embodied creatures, they share mortality and vulnerability. Human animality does not, however, negate human difference. Man differs from animals through perfectibility: the freedom to change. That difference comes from the lack of an…
Inscribing the Egalitarian Event
General Will in Political Philosophy
Finite Community
Jean-Luc Nancy identifies Rousseau as the first to conceive community as a lost state of immediacy and transparency. Rousseau’s conception has allegedly shaped the western ideal of an immanent community. Nancy deconstructs that ideal, arguing that immanence would suppress community; its oneness would block the being-with which enables our ontological being-in-common. This article argues that Rousseau never posits a lost community but actually exp…
Derrida's Deconstruction of the Subject
Thea Bellou's Derrida's Deconstruction of the Subject: Writing, Self and Other critically examines Derrida's engagement with the question of the subject and its relation to alterity from the early
Michel Leiris’ Anthropology and the Ontology of Finitude
Michel Leiris’ Anthropology and the Ontology of Finitude:Reading the Ethnographic Writings Through the Lens of Miroir de la Tauromachie Kevin Inston (bio) In the retrospective prefaces of L’Afrique fantȏme (1934), Leiris describes the change in “perspective” in his ethnography from the search for “communion” or “un contact vrai” with African society to the active defense of African anti-colonial movements as the most realistic form of intercultur…
Representing the unrepresentable
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ernesto Laclau and the somewhat particular universal
Rousseau's general will is mostly interpreted as promoting social unity at the expense of plurality. Conversely, this article argues that the general will depends on, and preserves, plurality for its formation and legitimacy. The general and the particular are not fixed opposites, for Rousseau, but are interdependent and contextually defined. The Rousseauian universal anticipates Laclau's notion of universality. The absence of any natural foundat…
Representing the unrepresentable
Inscribing the Egalitarian Event
Finite Community
Jean-Luc Nancy identifies Rousseau as the first to conceive community as a lost state of immediacy and transparency. Rousseau’s conception has allegedly shaped the western ideal of an immanent community. Nancy deconstructs that ideal, arguing that immanence would suppress community; its oneness would block the being-with which enables our ontological being-in-common. This article argues that Rousseau never posits a lost community but actually exp…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ernesto Laclau and the somewhat particular universal
Rousseau's general will is mostly interpreted as promoting social unity at the expense of plurality. Conversely, this article argues that the general will depends on, and preserves, plurality for its formation and legitimacy. The general and the particular are not fixed opposites, for Rousseau, but are interdependent and contextually defined. The Rousseauian universal anticipates Laclau's notion of universality. The absence of any natural foundat…
Improper communities in the work of Roberto Esposito and Jacques Rancière
The Human-Animal Relation in Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality
The Discourse on Inequality disputes the human-animal hierarchy in its denunciation of social inequality as unnatural. Stripping away social artifice, it reveals a deep physical continuity between man and animals. As embodied creatures, they share mortality and vulnerability. Human animality does not, however, negate human difference. Man differs from animals through perfectibility: the freedom to change. That difference comes from the lack of an…
Derrida's Deconstruction of the Subject
Thea Bellou's Derrida's Deconstruction of the Subject: Writing, Self and Other critically examines Derrida's engagement with the question of the subject and its relation to alterity from the early
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ernesto Laclau and the somewhat particular universal
Rousseau's general will is mostly interpreted as promoting social unity at the expense of plurality. Conversely, this article argues that the general will depends on, and preserves, plurality for its formation and legitimacy. The general and the particular are not fixed opposites, for Rousseau, but are interdependent and contextually defined. The Rousseauian universal anticipates Laclau's notion of universality. The absence of any natural foundat…
Representing the unrepresentable
Derrida's Deconstruction of the Subject
Thea Bellou's Derrida's Deconstruction of the Subject: Writing, Self and Other critically examines Derrida's engagement with the question of the subject and its relation to alterity from the early
Michel Leiris’ Anthropology and the Ontology of Finitude
Michel Leiris’ Anthropology and the Ontology of Finitude:Reading the Ethnographic Writings Through the Lens of Miroir de la Tauromachie Kevin Inston (bio) In the retrospective prefaces of L’Afrique fantȏme (1934), Leiris describes the change in “perspective” in his ethnography from the search for “communion” or “un contact vrai” with African society to the active defense of African anti-colonial movements as the most realistic form of intercultur…
Finite Community
Jean-Luc Nancy identifies Rousseau as the first to conceive community as a lost state of immediacy and transparency. Rousseau’s conception has allegedly shaped the western ideal of an immanent community. Nancy deconstructs that ideal, arguing that immanence would suppress community; its oneness would block the being-with which enables our ontological being-in-common. This article argues that Rousseau never posits a lost community but actually exp…
Inscribing the Egalitarian Event
General Will in Political Philosophy
Chantal Mouffe
The Human-Animal Relation in Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality
The Discourse on Inequality disputes the human-animal hierarchy in its denunciation of social inequality as unnatural. Stripping away social artifice, it reveals a deep physical continuity between man and animals. As embodied creatures, they share mortality and vulnerability. Human animality does not, however, negate human difference. Man differs from animals through perfectibility: the freedom to change. That difference comes from the lack of an…
Improper communities in the work of Roberto Esposito and Jacques Rancière
Sense, Orientation, and World Creation
This article stages a dialogue between Jean-Luc Nancy’s postphenomenology and Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology to examine the conditions, ethos, and politics of world creation as well as the habits, obstacles, and inequalities that resist it. It argues that Nancy’s understanding of sense as the event of the mutual exposure of bodies reveals what exceeds dominant worldviews, how bodies extend the world beyond prevailing spatializations, but that i…
Rethinking the Politics of Belonging
Making Sense of Property with Jean-Jacques Rousseau
This article argues that property is contingent, for Rousseau, being enacted through appropriation which creates a boundary that encloses something as owned while exposing it to others free to respect or reject ownership. It is proper neither to the individual nor to community but constituted through their articulation. This emphasis on relationality differentiates Rousseau’s theory from Locke’s. The self-enclosure of possessive individualism wou…
Sociology (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Law (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Environmental ethics (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works)