James Trafford
Biographic Data
| ID | 357699 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Trafford |
| GIVEN NAMES | James |
| FAMILY NAME | Trafford |
| SIGNATURE | TRAFFORD J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University for the Creative Arts |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6762-2918 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Freedom as Fetish
Recent Marxist political theory has foregrounded freedom as normative commitment. This paper re-stages the break between slavery and capitalism through which slavery's natural bondage is supposedly superseded by the compulsions of market dependency. Capitalist social practices depend upon our freedom whilst inculcating a system in which domination and freedom are interdependent. But this interdependence leads to a double-bind: if freedom is reduc…
The subject, the worker, and the slave reification, capitalism, and the divestment of reason from freedom
This article traces a line of thought through a reading of Lukács to suggest that the promise of Enlightenment modernity to emancipate thought from extrahuman authority is an impossibility because the problem of sovereignty returns in the form of the problem of freedom. The authority to make ourselves responsible, and act according to norms of our own making is the keystone feature of philosophical modernity. But this capacity to self-determine r…
Impossible Freedoms: Slavery and (in)Capacity in Kant’s Enlightenment
The figure of slavery is of central importance to Enlightenment accounts of individual and collective freedom. The slave appears in these accounts as negative infraction of liberty, with freedom defined as self-mastery against the mastery of another’s whim. This paper suggests a speculative reconstruction of the Kantian trajectory of thought shaping freedom’s relation to slavery by drawing on Afro-pessimism’s engagement with the aporias generated…
Anti-Blackness as Disavowal and Condition: Rethinking Foucault’s “Carceral Society”
Recent calls to “defund the police” have seen a plethora of movements decry state funds allocated to the police and ask that those funds be placed elsewhere. In this article, we return to Michel Foucault to analyze how calls for rebalancing budgets away from the police force and towards social projects both rely on political categories established in Foucault's work and encapsulates an aporia that emerges through them. Locating shifts towards the…
Care as Counterinsurgency
In Louisiana in 2021 a group of Black fathers gathered in the form of Dads on Duty to pre-empt increasing violence amongst their children at a local high school. Activist and writer Harsha Walia hailed this as community-based care exemplifying abolition in practice. This coheres with a recent focus on care as a political project providing an antidote to anti-Black violence. However, this case is instructive in foregrounding the limitations of a p…
Reason and power: Difference, structural implication, and political transformation
Empire's New Clothes: After the “Peaceful Violence” of Neoliberal Coloniality
This article considers neoliberalism through the "peaceful violence" of its social spaces that are stratified and ordered around raciality whilst abjuring the explicit presence of racialised power. Many dominant analyses of neoliberalism in the social science have figured racial injustices as ideological fossils to be swept away by a fundamentally neutral political economy that has shaped all human activity according to market principles. As such…
Communicating content
Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind
Impossible Freedoms: Slavery and (in)Capacity in Kant’s Enlightenment
The figure of slavery is of central importance to Enlightenment accounts of individual and collective freedom. The slave appears in these accounts as negative infraction of liberty, with freedom defined as self-mastery against the mastery of another’s whim. This paper suggests a speculative reconstruction of the Kantian trajectory of thought shaping freedom’s relation to slavery by drawing on Afro-pessimism’s engagement with the aporias generated…
Empire's New Clothes: After the “Peaceful Violence” of Neoliberal Coloniality
This article considers neoliberalism through the "peaceful violence" of its social spaces that are stratified and ordered around raciality whilst abjuring the explicit presence of racialised power. Many dominant analyses of neoliberalism in the social science have figured racial injustices as ideological fossils to be swept away by a fundamentally neutral political economy that has shaped all human activity according to market principles. As such…
Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind
Communicating content
Reason and power: Difference, structural implication, and political transformation
Empire's New Clothes: After the “Peaceful Violence” of Neoliberal Coloniality
This article considers neoliberalism through the "peaceful violence" of its social spaces that are stratified and ordered around raciality whilst abjuring the explicit presence of racialised power. Many dominant analyses of neoliberalism in the social science have figured racial injustices as ideological fossils to be swept away by a fundamentally neutral political economy that has shaped all human activity according to market principles. As such…
Anti-Blackness as Disavowal and Condition: Rethinking Foucault’s “Carceral Society”
Recent calls to “defund the police” have seen a plethora of movements decry state funds allocated to the police and ask that those funds be placed elsewhere. In this article, we return to Michel Foucault to analyze how calls for rebalancing budgets away from the police force and towards social projects both rely on political categories established in Foucault's work and encapsulates an aporia that emerges through them. Locating shifts towards the…
Care as Counterinsurgency
In Louisiana in 2021 a group of Black fathers gathered in the form of Dads on Duty to pre-empt increasing violence amongst their children at a local high school. Activist and writer Harsha Walia hailed this as community-based care exemplifying abolition in practice. This coheres with a recent focus on care as a political project providing an antidote to anti-Black violence. However, this case is instructive in foregrounding the limitations of a p…
Freedom as Fetish
Recent Marxist political theory has foregrounded freedom as normative commitment. This paper re-stages the break between slavery and capitalism through which slavery's natural bondage is supposedly superseded by the compulsions of market dependency. Capitalist social practices depend upon our freedom whilst inculcating a system in which domination and freedom are interdependent. But this interdependence leads to a double-bind: if freedom is reduc…
The subject, the worker, and the slave reification, capitalism, and the divestment of reason from freedom
This article traces a line of thought through a reading of Lukács to suggest that the promise of Enlightenment modernity to emancipate thought from extrahuman authority is an impossibility because the problem of sovereignty returns in the form of the problem of freedom. The authority to make ourselves responsible, and act according to norms of our own making is the keystone feature of philosophical modernity. But this capacity to self-determine r…
Impossible Freedoms: Slavery and (in)Capacity in Kant’s Enlightenment
The figure of slavery is of central importance to Enlightenment accounts of individual and collective freedom. The slave appears in these accounts as negative infraction of liberty, with freedom defined as self-mastery against the mastery of another’s whim. This paper suggests a speculative reconstruction of the Kantian trajectory of thought shaping freedom’s relation to slavery by drawing on Afro-pessimism’s engagement with the aporias generated…
Epistemology (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Law (4 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Economics (3 works) · Law (3 works) · Law and economics (3 works)