My work examines the mediations through which political orders become intelligible, durable, and contestable — how violence, inequality, extraction, and domination are converted into recognizable political forms and common sense. These conversions are accomplished through concepts, institutions, legal forms, economic structures, and historical narratives. I ask how they stabilize political worlds, and how critical traditions make them available for contestation.
What Is a Political Imaginary? investigates the concept of the collective imaginary—now ubiquitous across the humanities, social sciences, and political discourse—both theoretically and historically. The project traces the term’s genealogy from post-war French phenomenology and psychology through three entwined intellectual lineages—phenomenological hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and post-Marxism—showing how divergent and largely incompatible accounts were subsequently imported into anglophone theory, stripped of their historical determinations.
The book further examines how “imaginary” came to function as a stand-in for ideology, utopia, and fantasy, and critically interrogates the neo-utopian investment in collective imaginaries as catalysts of radical change. The result is a philosophical and political critique that exposes the concept as theoretically underdetermined and symptomatic of deeper problems in contemporary critical theory.
Related writing →“The proliferation of ‘imaginaries’ reflects a broader displacement of the concepts of ideology and utopia.”
This project uses the two-hundred-year voyage of the Spanish frigate Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes as a lens for a critical genealogy of the modern global order. Sunk in an 1804 naval battle and rediscovered in 2007 by a salvage corporation, the ship became the center of a major legal dispute pitting Spain, Peru, and private claimants against one another.
By tracing the ship’s itinerary—from colonial silver mines in the Andes through Atlantic trade routes to contemporary courtrooms and museums—the project examines four interconnected axes: the juridical status of land and sea, the changing nature of state sovereignty under neoliberalism, the lingering colonial structures of international law, and the role of patrimony and heritage in reproducing state power.
Related writing →“Whose ship? Whose silver? Whose sea? The Mercedes case rehearses the unresolved colonial contradictions of the modern international order.”
This research project offers a sustained and multi-dimensional interpretation of Niccolò Machiavelli’s political thought, with particular attention to the entanglements of violence, inequality, and political order. The foundational work reconstructs Machiavelli’s theory of political violence, arguing that violence in his writings is neither a generic technology of government nor a last resort, but a performative practice structurally linked to class conflict and inequality.
Subsequent research extends this framework in new directions: analyzing Machiavelli’s treatment of sexual and gender-based violence through his treatment of the Lucretia myth; examining his surprising account of Genoa’s Bank of San Giorgio as a window onto the political power of financial oligarchy; and tracing his theory of punishment across his corpus.
Related writing →“Le crudeltà della moltitudine sono contro a chi ei temano che occupi il bene commune: quelle d’un principe sono contro a chi ei temano che occupi il bene proprio.”— Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, 1.59