Michael Feola
Biographic Data
| ID | 4158947 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Feola |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Feola |
| SIGNATURE | FEOLA M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lafayette College |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1275-6326 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Sun, Steel, and Raw Eggs: The Far-right Politics of the Male Body
This article explores an emerging strain of far-right politics that makes two major claims: (1) that cultural decline can be tracked to a feminized, egalitarian society; and (2) restoring culture (or the nation) hinges upon resurrecting “true” masculinity. What distinguishes this movement is not simply an abstract investment in masculinity, but an investment in the hardened, purified male body as the path to renewal. As the article details, the f…
A Flood of Voters for Them”: Replacement Fantasies and Democratic Distortion in the 2024 Election
This article explores how the 2024 Trump campaign persistently invoked the so-called “great replacement” narrative to promote a politics of racial fear. As the article details, this messaging relied upon the mutability of the replacement narrative – highlighting a supposed plot by the Democratic Party to “import voters” from Latin America in order to corrupt the democratic process. This strategy yielded a variety of civic costs. By foregrounding …
Metapolitics and Demographic Anxiety on the New Right: Using and Abusing the Language of Equality
The recent politics of demographic anxiety has been shaped by an influential New Right argument: a) that Western nations are experiencing an immigration crisis that threatens their cultural integrity (i.e., a “Great Replacement”), and b) that this crisis is fueled by the egalitarian commitments of liberalism. Accordingly, in this essay I engage core figures of the New Right to pursue two lines of analysis. At one level, I interrogate the asserted…
You Will Not Replace Us: The Melancholic Nationalism of Whiteness
This article addresses recent strains of white nationalism rooted within anxieties over demographic replacement (e.g., “the Great Replacement”). More broadly, the article argues that the contemporary politics of white grievance cannot be reduced to an ahistorical desire for racial supremacy. Rather, these anxieties represent the political reflex to perceptions of loss on the part of historical white majorities—a loss that takes a distinctly melan…
Blood from a Turnip: Debt, Race, and Expropriation in Penal Capitalism
Debt is now a staple in the literature on neoliberalism. And the growth of penal debt, more specifically, has come to the attention of those who study mass incarceration. This essay pursues the rise of financial sanctions in the carceral state, in order to track the broader economies of power that are served through such debt. Ultimately, the article argues that offender debt practice resonates with the historical aims of racial capitalism, to ex…
Excess Words, Surplus Names: Rancière and Habermas on Speech, Agency, and Equality
Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Rancière treat speech as the medium for politics and, likewise, both diagnose the pathologies that follow from blockages on civic speech. That said, these broad commonalities give rise to significant divides regarding the social ontology of language, the forms of power that attend linguistic exchange, and how speech informs democratic agency. Ultimately, the essay will argue that Rancière highlights the political defic…
The Powers of Sensibility: Aesthetic Politics through Adorno, Foucault, and Rancière
The Body Politic: Bodily Spectacle and Democratic Agency
This essay engages an undertheorized form of democratic agency: the embodied spectacle that characterizes a strain of activist politics. Where an existing literature addresses “the spectacle” as a tactic of power, it does not do justice to how marginal groups have used radical bodily acts in order to intervene within the image-world of democratic politics (e.g., hunger strikes, die-ins, self-immolation). The essay argues that such performances re…
Beyond the One-Dimensional Subject: Power, Sensibility, and Agency
Fear and Loathing in Democratic Times: Affect, Citizenship and Agency
This article engages some questions raised by recent work on civil society: What is missed by a rationalist reduction of politics, and why does it matter? How does the somatic dimension of citizenship open deliberation to social economies of power? From these questions, the article interrogates what agency is possible if power is inscribed within the affects that mobilize action and judgment – with particular attention to the work of William Conn…
Speaking Subjects and Democratic Space: Rancière and the Politics of Speech
This essay engages Jacques Rancière's politics of speech. On one familiar story, the ideal of democratic inclusion is betrayed when groups are blocked from participation and thus are rendered voiceless. The normative task, then, is to eliminate these blockages, so as to open the broadest possibilities for unfettered critical dialogue. However, Rancière helps to reveal that deliberative approaches are not sufficiently attuned to democratic process…
Difference without fear: Adorno contra liberalism
This article intervenes in recent debates surrounding Adorno’s contribution to critical social theory. Where it is something of a commonplace to argue that Adorno pessimistically withdraws from political concerns, the article argues for a more productive set of normative contributions – based within his utopian gestures towards a ‘difference without fear’. At stake is not only a more sensitive approach to Adorno’s texts, but the broader normative…
Norms, vision and violence: Judith Butler on the politics of legibility
Kant and the Concept of Community
The concept of community plays a central role in Kant's theoretical philosophy, his practical philosophy, his aesthetics, and his religious thought. Kant uses community in many philosophical contexts: the category of community introduced in his table of categories in the Critique of Pure Reason; the community of substances in the third analogy; the realm of ends as an ethical community; the state and the public sphere as political communities; th…
Truth and illusion in the philosophy of right: Hegel and liberalism
It is often thought that Hegel’s social philosophy is straightforwardly hostile toward liberal ideals. In this article, I contend that many such suspicions can be dispelled through a more nuanced engagement with his rhetorical and argumentative strategies. To tackle such a broad topic in this space, I focus on the shortcomings of a rights-based individualism within the Philosophy of Right — where Hegel describes civil society as a ‘semblance’ [Sc…
Redemption of the Many in the One”: Adorno, Damaged Life, and Aesthetic Reparation
Research Article| December 01 2009 “REDEMPTION OF THE MANY IN THE ONE”: Adorno, Damaged Life, and Aesthetic Reparation Michael Feola Michael Feola Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2009) 92 (3-4): 213–238. https://doi.org/10.2307/41179246 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Feola; “REDEMPTION OF THE MANY IN THE ONE”: Adorno, Damaged Life…
You Will Not Replace Us: The Melancholic Nationalism of Whiteness
This article addresses recent strains of white nationalism rooted within anxieties over demographic replacement (e.g., “the Great Replacement”). More broadly, the article argues that the contemporary politics of white grievance cannot be reduced to an ahistorical desire for racial supremacy. Rather, these anxieties represent the political reflex to perceptions of loss on the part of historical white majorities—a loss that takes a distinctly melan…
Speaking Subjects and Democratic Space: Rancière and the Politics of Speech
This essay engages Jacques Rancière's politics of speech. On one familiar story, the ideal of democratic inclusion is betrayed when groups are blocked from participation and thus are rendered voiceless. The normative task, then, is to eliminate these blockages, so as to open the broadest possibilities for unfettered critical dialogue. However, Rancière helps to reveal that deliberative approaches are not sufficiently attuned to democratic process…
Norms, vision and violence: Judith Butler on the politics of legibility
Metapolitics and Demographic Anxiety on the New Right: Using and Abusing the Language of Equality
The recent politics of demographic anxiety has been shaped by an influential New Right argument: a) that Western nations are experiencing an immigration crisis that threatens their cultural integrity (i.e., a “Great Replacement”), and b) that this crisis is fueled by the egalitarian commitments of liberalism. Accordingly, in this essay I engage core figures of the New Right to pursue two lines of analysis. At one level, I interrogate the asserted…
The Body Politic: Bodily Spectacle and Democratic Agency
This essay engages an undertheorized form of democratic agency: the embodied spectacle that characterizes a strain of activist politics. Where an existing literature addresses “the spectacle” as a tactic of power, it does not do justice to how marginal groups have used radical bodily acts in order to intervene within the image-world of democratic politics (e.g., hunger strikes, die-ins, self-immolation). The essay argues that such performances re…
Fear and Loathing in Democratic Times: Affect, Citizenship and Agency
This article engages some questions raised by recent work on civil society: What is missed by a rationalist reduction of politics, and why does it matter? How does the somatic dimension of citizenship open deliberation to social economies of power? From these questions, the article interrogates what agency is possible if power is inscribed within the affects that mobilize action and judgment – with particular attention to the work of William Conn…
Excess Words, Surplus Names: Rancière and Habermas on Speech, Agency, and Equality
Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Rancière treat speech as the medium for politics and, likewise, both diagnose the pathologies that follow from blockages on civic speech. That said, these broad commonalities give rise to significant divides regarding the social ontology of language, the forms of power that attend linguistic exchange, and how speech informs democratic agency. Ultimately, the essay will argue that Rancière highlights the political defic…
Difference without fear: Adorno contra liberalism
This article intervenes in recent debates surrounding Adorno’s contribution to critical social theory. Where it is something of a commonplace to argue that Adorno pessimistically withdraws from political concerns, the article argues for a more productive set of normative contributions – based within his utopian gestures towards a ‘difference without fear’. At stake is not only a more sensitive approach to Adorno’s texts, but the broader normative…
Truth and illusion in the philosophy of right: Hegel and liberalism
It is often thought that Hegel’s social philosophy is straightforwardly hostile toward liberal ideals. In this article, I contend that many such suspicions can be dispelled through a more nuanced engagement with his rhetorical and argumentative strategies. To tackle such a broad topic in this space, I focus on the shortcomings of a rights-based individualism within the Philosophy of Right — where Hegel describes civil society as a ‘semblance’ [Sc…
Redemption of the Many in the One”: Adorno, Damaged Life, and Aesthetic Reparation
Research Article| December 01 2009 “REDEMPTION OF THE MANY IN THE ONE”: Adorno, Damaged Life, and Aesthetic Reparation Michael Feola Michael Feola Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2009) 92 (3-4): 213–238. https://doi.org/10.2307/41179246 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Feola; “REDEMPTION OF THE MANY IN THE ONE”: Adorno, Damaged Life…
Truth and illusion in the philosophy of right: Hegel and liberalism
It is often thought that Hegel’s social philosophy is straightforwardly hostile toward liberal ideals. In this article, I contend that many such suspicions can be dispelled through a more nuanced engagement with his rhetorical and argumentative strategies. To tackle such a broad topic in this space, I focus on the shortcomings of a rights-based individualism within the Philosophy of Right — where Hegel describes civil society as a ‘semblance’ [Sc…
Kant and the Concept of Community
The concept of community plays a central role in Kant's theoretical philosophy, his practical philosophy, his aesthetics, and his religious thought. Kant uses community in many philosophical contexts: the category of community introduced in his table of categories in the Critique of Pure Reason; the community of substances in the third analogy; the realm of ends as an ethical community; the state and the public sphere as political communities; th…
Speaking Subjects and Democratic Space: Rancière and the Politics of Speech
This essay engages Jacques Rancière's politics of speech. On one familiar story, the ideal of democratic inclusion is betrayed when groups are blocked from participation and thus are rendered voiceless. The normative task, then, is to eliminate these blockages, so as to open the broadest possibilities for unfettered critical dialogue. However, Rancière helps to reveal that deliberative approaches are not sufficiently attuned to democratic process…
Difference without fear: Adorno contra liberalism
This article intervenes in recent debates surrounding Adorno’s contribution to critical social theory. Where it is something of a commonplace to argue that Adorno pessimistically withdraws from political concerns, the article argues for a more productive set of normative contributions – based within his utopian gestures towards a ‘difference without fear’. At stake is not only a more sensitive approach to Adorno’s texts, but the broader normative…
Norms, vision and violence: Judith Butler on the politics of legibility
Fear and Loathing in Democratic Times: Affect, Citizenship and Agency
This article engages some questions raised by recent work on civil society: What is missed by a rationalist reduction of politics, and why does it matter? How does the somatic dimension of citizenship open deliberation to social economies of power? From these questions, the article interrogates what agency is possible if power is inscribed within the affects that mobilize action and judgment – with particular attention to the work of William Conn…
Beyond the One-Dimensional Subject: Power, Sensibility, and Agency
The Powers of Sensibility: Aesthetic Politics through Adorno, Foucault, and Rancière
The Body Politic: Bodily Spectacle and Democratic Agency
This essay engages an undertheorized form of democratic agency: the embodied spectacle that characterizes a strain of activist politics. Where an existing literature addresses “the spectacle” as a tactic of power, it does not do justice to how marginal groups have used radical bodily acts in order to intervene within the image-world of democratic politics (e.g., hunger strikes, die-ins, self-immolation). The essay argues that such performances re…
Excess Words, Surplus Names: Rancière and Habermas on Speech, Agency, and Equality
Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Rancière treat speech as the medium for politics and, likewise, both diagnose the pathologies that follow from blockages on civic speech. That said, these broad commonalities give rise to significant divides regarding the social ontology of language, the forms of power that attend linguistic exchange, and how speech informs democratic agency. Ultimately, the essay will argue that Rancière highlights the political defic…
Blood from a Turnip: Debt, Race, and Expropriation in Penal Capitalism
Debt is now a staple in the literature on neoliberalism. And the growth of penal debt, more specifically, has come to the attention of those who study mass incarceration. This essay pursues the rise of financial sanctions in the carceral state, in order to track the broader economies of power that are served through such debt. Ultimately, the article argues that offender debt practice resonates with the historical aims of racial capitalism, to ex…
You Will Not Replace Us: The Melancholic Nationalism of Whiteness
This article addresses recent strains of white nationalism rooted within anxieties over demographic replacement (e.g., “the Great Replacement”). More broadly, the article argues that the contemporary politics of white grievance cannot be reduced to an ahistorical desire for racial supremacy. Rather, these anxieties represent the political reflex to perceptions of loss on the part of historical white majorities—a loss that takes a distinctly melan…
Metapolitics and Demographic Anxiety on the New Right: Using and Abusing the Language of Equality
The recent politics of demographic anxiety has been shaped by an influential New Right argument: a) that Western nations are experiencing an immigration crisis that threatens their cultural integrity (i.e., a “Great Replacement”), and b) that this crisis is fueled by the egalitarian commitments of liberalism. Accordingly, in this essay I engage core figures of the New Right to pursue two lines of analysis. At one level, I interrogate the asserted…
Sun, Steel, and Raw Eggs: The Far-right Politics of the Male Body
This article explores an emerging strain of far-right politics that makes two major claims: (1) that cultural decline can be tracked to a feminized, egalitarian society; and (2) restoring culture (or the nation) hinges upon resurrecting “true” masculinity. What distinguishes this movement is not simply an abstract investment in masculinity, but an investment in the hardened, purified male body as the path to renewal. As the article details, the f…
A Flood of Voters for Them”: Replacement Fantasies and Democratic Distortion in the 2024 Election
This article explores how the 2024 Trump campaign persistently invoked the so-called “great replacement” narrative to promote a politics of racial fear. As the article details, this messaging relied upon the mutability of the replacement narrative – highlighting a supposed plot by the Democratic Party to “import voters” from Latin America in order to corrupt the democratic process. This strategy yielded a variety of civic costs. By foregrounding …
Politics (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Democracy (7 works) · Aesthetics (4 works)