Thomas Nail
Biographic Data
| ID | 459491 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Nail |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Nail |
| SIGNATURE | NAIL T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Denver |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5448-7561 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 113 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Climate Migration as Planetary Primitive Accumulation in advance
This essay argues that contemporary climate migration must be understood not simply as a response to environmental disaster, but as a central mechanism of planetary primitive accumulation under global capitalism. As climate change displaces migrants, global capitalism exploits this mobility through mass dispossession, racialized border regimes, and labor devalorization. Capitalist produced climate change generates profits through border industrie…
Marine Materialism
Philosophy of Virginia Woolf: Moments of Becoming
Towards the end of her life, Virginia Woolf defined her "philosophy"-the "constant idea" that "makes her a writer." She wrote that this idea had given her "the strongest pleasure known to [her]." She called these "exceptional moments," or "moments of being." Thomas Nail contends that Woolf is a philosopher of being. And these "moments of being" as forming a unique process philosophy of motion. In her description of these moments Woolf gives us ac…
Matter and Motion: A Brief History of Kinetic Materialism
Tells a new history of materialism – from prehistory to the present – that resists stasis, hierarchy and domination Traces a lineage of thinkers who have philosophically integrated ideas of matter, motion, indeterminacy, relationality and process Discusses thinkers drawn from the ancient to the modern – from the Bronze Age to quantum physics – who each offer their own kind of evidence for a world without metaphysics or hierarchy Shows that the es…
Matter and Motion
O que é o novo materialismo
This paper argues that there is currently no single definition of new materialism but at least three distinct and partly incompatible trajectories. All three of these trajectories share at least one common theoretical commitment: to problematize the anthropocentric and constructivist orientations of most twentieth-century theory in a way that encourages closer attention to the sciences by the humanities. This paper emerges from our desire to offe…
The Swerve and Ancient Materialism
Author(s): Thomas Nail and Katerina Kolozova Title (English): The Swerve and Ancient Materialism Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 19, No. 1-2 (2022). Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Page Range: 58-71 Page Count: 13 Citation (English): Thomas Nail and Katerina Kolozova, “The Swerve and Ancient Materialism,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 19, No…
What is Covid capitalism
The term ‘COVID capitalism’ designates the ways capitalism and the novel coronavirus alter and amplify one another. In this paper, I look at four major features that characterize this relationship so far. (1) Capitalist extraction and urbanization increase exposure to new viruses. (2) Capitalism increases the spread of infectious disease. (3) COVID amplifies inequalities that benefit capitalists. (4) COVID has led to profits, bailouts, and deregu…
Migration and the New Communist Politics
Lucretius III: A History of Motion
Theory of the Object
The Ancient Object I
This chapter and the next argue that several ancient sciences created cardinal objects using centrifugal motions. Specifically, this chapter shows how cardinal objects developed out of four ancient scientific practices: the use of numerals, accounting, measurement, and logic. It focuses on the invention of numerals and the use of ancient accounting practices. It also shows how each of these four practices moves through four similar stages of incr…
The Figure of the Migrant
At a time when more people than ever are being constrained to move for political, economic, and environmental reasons, this book provides a new political theory of migration, one based on the social primacy of movement.
Lucretius II: An Ethics of Motion
An ancient ethics for modern life Develops an original ethics of motion for the 21st century from Lucretius' didactic poem De Rerum Natura Argues uniquely that Lucretius had a distinct ethical theory from Epicurus Puts Lucretius in conversation with contemporary physics and new materialism Lucretius II launch offer Find out where it all started: we're offering a free ebook of Lucretius I when you buy a copy of Lucretius II . Just add a copy of Lu…
Lucretius II
Philosophy in the Time of Covid
The COVID world is just like it was before, only more so. Every problem that already existed is worse. What can philosophy do in such a world? I think there are at least two opportunities for philosophy today. The first is that philosophers can seize this historical moment to intervene in almost every sector of social, political, and ethical life. The second unique opportunity I think philosophers have is to create new concepts in response to new…
Chapter 10. The Barbarian
Marx in Motion: A New Materialist Marxism
Socialism is back, and with it comes a renewed interest in Marx’s critique of capitalism. After the 2008 financial crash, international book sales of Capital exploded for the first time in decades. In a world of rising income inequality, right-wing nationalisms, and global climate change, people are looking to the father of modern socialism for answers. This book has been written to help those returning to Marx get answers to their pressing quest…
Lucretius II: An Ethics of Motion
Marx in Motion: A New Materialist Marxism
Theory of the Image
The Ancient Image, I
This chapter and the next argue that a kinesthetic shift occurred in the arts from a centripetal to a more centrifugal pattern of motion during the ancient period. This claim is supported by looking closely at the kinetic patterns produced by six major aesthetic fields that define the ancient image, the first three of which are discussed in this chapter: written verse, tragedy, and metallurgy (the city, the chordophone, and pharmakon are discusse…
The Ancient Image, II
This chapter continues the thesis presented in Chapter 7, in demonstrating that a kinesthetic shift occurs in the arts from a centripetal to a more centrifugal pattern of motion over the course of the ancient period. In Chapter 7, we looked closely at this centrifugal pattern in the formal arts of written verse, tragedy, and metallurgy. In this chapter, we demonstrate the dominance of the same kinetic pattern in the arts of architecture, music, a…
Centrifugal Form
This chapter argues that aesthetic form emerges from matter in motion. Form is not different in kind than matter and function; it is different only in kinetic distribution or regime. The form of something is always a circulation of motion, but in a specific pattern. Form is not a geometric essence, like a circle or an empirical object like a round plate, but, rather, a material kinetic process of rounding or roundness. The form or shape of images…
Being and Motion
Being and Motion offers an original philosophical ontology of movement. The history of philosophy has systematically explained movement as derived from something else that does not move: space, eternity, force, and time. Why, when movement has been central to human societies, did a philosophy based on movement never take hold in the West? This book is the first major work of systematic ontology to answer this question and finally overturn this lo…
What Is New Materialism
New materialism is one of the most important emerging trends in the humanities and social sciences, but it is also one of the least understood. This is because, as a term of ongoing contestation, it currently has no single definition. The novel contribution of this article is to offer a critical introduction to new materialism that distinguishes between three commonly conflated strands and to argue for what we find to be the most promising and no…
A Tale of Two Crises: Migration and Terrorism after the Paris Attacks
This paper argues that the figure of the migrant has come to be seen as a potential terrorist in the West, under the condition of a double, but completely opposed, set of crises internal to the nation‐state. The refugee crisis in Europe can no longer be understood as separate from the crisis of terrorism after the Paris attacks on 13 November 2015. In fact, the two crises were never really separate in the nationalist imaginary to begin with. The …
Alain Badiou and the Sans-Papiers
The rising number of non-status migrants is one of the central political issues of our time. This essay argues that if we want to understand the political and philosophical importance of this phenomenon, the contributions of Alain Badiou, his militant group L'Organisation politique (OP), and the struggle of the sans-papiers movement in France are absolutely crucial. This is the case because, I will argue, Badiou, the OP, and the sans-papiers crea…
Forum 1: Migrant climate in the Kinocene
In this intervention, I put forward five short theses on the topic of ‘Anthropocene mobilities.’ My aim is not to unpack every concept contained herein but rather to provide a provocative introductory synthesis of five big ideas about Anthropocene mobility for further discussion. 1) We are living in the Kinocene, 2) The ontology of our time is an ontology of motion, 3) We need a new movement-oriented political theory to grapple better with the mo…
Between Deleuze and Foucault
The first rigorous, comparative discussion of Deleuze and Foucault: their philosophical relationship, their personal relationship and their divergences Deleuze and Foucault had a long, complicated and productive relationship, in which each was at various times a significant influence on the other. This collection combines 3 original essays by Deleuze and Foucault, in which they respond to each other's work, with 16 critical essays by key contempo…
The Crossroads of Power: Michel Foucault and the US/Mexico Border Wall
This paper draws on the work of Michel Foucault in order to analyze the constellation of political strategies and power at the US/Mexico border wall. These strategies, however, are incredibly diverse and often directly antagonistic of one another. Thus, this paper argues that in order to make sense of the seemingly multiple and contradictory political strategies deployed in the operation of the US/Mexico border wall, we have to understand the coe…
What is Covid capitalism
The term ‘COVID capitalism’ designates the ways capitalism and the novel coronavirus alter and amplify one another. In this paper, I look at four major features that characterize this relationship so far. (1) Capitalist extraction and urbanization increase exposure to new viruses. (2) Capitalism increases the spread of infectious disease. (3) COVID amplifies inequalities that benefit capitalists. (4) COVID has led to profits, bailouts, and deregu…
Violence at the Borders: Nomadic Solidarity and Non-Status Migrant Resistance
This paper argues that borders and violence against migrants no longer takes place exclusively at the geographical space between two sovereign territories. Instead border violence today has become much more normalized and diffused into society itself. An entire privatized industry now capitalizes on the cycle of transporting, incarcerating, hiring, and releasing non-status migrants. Similarly, however, resistance to this violence is also shifting…
Philosophy of Virginia Woolf: Moments of Becoming
Towards the end of her life, Virginia Woolf defined her "philosophy"-the "constant idea" that "makes her a writer." She wrote that this idea had given her "the strongest pleasure known to [her]." She called these "exceptional moments," or "moments of being." Thomas Nail contends that Woolf is a philosopher of being. And these "moments of being" as forming a unique process philosophy of motion. In her description of these moments Woolf gives us ac…
The Nomadic Proletariat: An Interview with Alain Badiou
Deleuze and Environmental Damage: Violence of the Text
Expression, Immanence and Constructivism: ‘Spinozism’ and Gilles Deleuze
This paper is an attempt to explicate the relationship between Spinozist expressionism and philosophical constructivism in Deleuze's work through the concept of immanent causality. Deleuze finds in Spinoza a philosophy of immanent causality used to solve the problem of the relation between substance, attribute and mode as an expression of substance. But, when he proceeds to take up this notion of immanent causality found in Spinoza in Difference …
Post-Capitalist Economics and Environmentalism
Chris Spannos (ed.), Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21 st Century , AK Press, 2008. Chris Spannos’ edited volume, Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21 st Century, provides a mu
Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo
Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo
We are witnessing the return of political revolution. However this is not a return to the classical forms of revolution: the capture of the state, the political representation of the party the centrality of the proletariat or the leadership of the vanguard. After the failure of such tactics over the last century, revolutionary strategy is now headed in an entirely new direction. This book argues that Deleuze, Guattari and the Zapatistas are at th…
Violence at the Borders: Nomadic Solidarity and Non-Status Migrant Resistance
This paper argues that borders and violence against migrants no longer takes place exclusively at the geographical space between two sovereign territories. Instead border violence today has become much more normalized and diffused into society itself. An entire privatized industry now capitalizes on the cycle of transporting, incarcerating, hiring, and releasing non-status migrants. Similarly, however, resistance to this violence is also shifting…
The Crossroads of Power: Michel Foucault and the US/Mexico Border Wall
This paper draws on the work of Michel Foucault in order to analyze the constellation of political strategies and power at the US/Mexico border wall. These strategies, however, are incredibly diverse and often directly antagonistic of one another. Thus, this paper argues that in order to make sense of the seemingly multiple and contradictory political strategies deployed in the operation of the US/Mexico border wall, we have to understand the coe…
Figure of the Migrant
Alain Badiou and the Sans-Papiers
The rising number of non-status migrants is one of the central political issues of our time. This essay argues that if we want to understand the political and philosophical importance of this phenomenon, the contributions of Alain Badiou, his militant group L'Organisation politique (OP), and the struggle of the sans-papiers movement in France are absolutely crucial. This is the case because, I will argue, Badiou, the OP, and the sans-papiers crea…
The Wall
This chapter develops a theory of the border structure of the wall. The wall as a border regime introduces a centrifugal social force that links together the fenced-in flows of territorial borders and mobilizes them into a single central power. This power is then deployed offensively through the use of military walls, defensively through the use of rampart walls, and as a technology of passage in port walls. In particular, the wall creates a cent…
Theory of the Border
"Despite -- and perhaps because of -- increasing global mobility, there are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be underst…
A Tale of Two Crises: Migration and Terrorism after the Paris Attacks
This paper argues that the figure of the migrant has come to be seen as a potential terrorist in the West, under the condition of a double, but completely opposed, set of crises internal to the nation‐state. The refugee crisis in Europe can no longer be understood as separate from the crisis of terrorism after the Paris attacks on 13 November 2015. In fact, the two crises were never really separate in the nationalist imaginary to begin with. The …
Between Deleuze and Foucault
The first rigorous, comparative discussion of Deleuze and Foucault: their philosophical relationship, their personal relationship and their divergences Deleuze and Foucault had a long, complicated and productive relationship, in which each was at various times a significant influence on the other. This collection combines 3 original essays by Deleuze and Foucault, in which they respond to each other's work, with 16 critical essays by key contempo…
What is an Assemblage
What is an Assemblage? Thomas Nail (bio) Introduction The concept of assemblage plays a crucial role in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In a 1980 interview with Catherine Clément, Deleuze describes their invention of the concept of the assemblage as the “general logic” at work in A Thousand Plateaus. However, despite its thirty years of influence on political theory, this “general logic of the assemblage” still remains obscur…
The Ontology of Motion
We live in an age of movement. More than at any other time in history, people and things move longer distances, more frequently, and faster than ever before. If being is increasingly defined by the historical primacy of motion today yet existing ontologies are not, then we need a new historical ontology of our mobile present. This essay offers what is perhaps the first introduction, definition, and history of “the ontology of motion,” as well as …
The Nomadic Proletariat: An Interview with Alain Badiou
Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion
Figures of the migrant: Structure and resistance
Theory of the Image
The Ancient Image, I
This chapter and the next argue that a kinesthetic shift occurred in the arts from a centripetal to a more centrifugal pattern of motion during the ancient period. This claim is supported by looking closely at the kinetic patterns produced by six major aesthetic fields that define the ancient image, the first three of which are discussed in this chapter: written verse, tragedy, and metallurgy (the city, the chordophone, and pharmakon are discusse…
The Ancient Image, II
This chapter continues the thesis presented in Chapter 7, in demonstrating that a kinesthetic shift occurs in the arts from a centripetal to a more centrifugal pattern of motion over the course of the ancient period. In Chapter 7, we looked closely at this centrifugal pattern in the formal arts of written verse, tragedy, and metallurgy. In this chapter, we demonstrate the dominance of the same kinetic pattern in the arts of architecture, music, a…
Centrifugal Form
This chapter argues that aesthetic form emerges from matter in motion. Form is not different in kind than matter and function; it is different only in kinetic distribution or regime. The form of something is always a circulation of motion, but in a specific pattern. Form is not a geometric essence, like a circle or an empirical object like a round plate, but, rather, a material kinetic process of rounding or roundness. The form or shape of images…
Being and Motion
Being and Motion offers an original philosophical ontology of movement. The history of philosophy has systematically explained movement as derived from something else that does not move: space, eternity, force, and time. Why, when movement has been central to human societies, did a philosophy based on movement never take hold in the West? This book is the first major work of systematic ontology to answer this question and finally overturn this lo…
Forum 1: Migrant climate in the Kinocene
In this intervention, I put forward five short theses on the topic of ‘Anthropocene mobilities.’ My aim is not to unpack every concept contained herein but rather to provide a provocative introductory synthesis of five big ideas about Anthropocene mobility for further discussion. 1) We are living in the Kinocene, 2) The ontology of our time is an ontology of motion, 3) We need a new movement-oriented political theory to grapple better with the mo…
What Is New Materialism
New materialism is one of the most important emerging trends in the humanities and social sciences, but it is also one of the least understood. This is because, as a term of ongoing contestation, it currently has no single definition. The novel contribution of this article is to offer a critical introduction to new materialism that distinguishes between three commonly conflated strands and to argue for what we find to be the most promising and no…
Philosophy (17 works) · Political science (15 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · History (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Artificial Intelligence (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Law (7 works)