Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Two lines of inquiry guide my research. First, my field of specialization is modern and contemporary Catalan culture. My first book, Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City (Liverpool UP, 2012), examines the symbolic and material transformations that redefined Barcelona during the 1980s in preparation for the 1992 Olympic Games. Given that the Games were among the first global mega-events that celebrated the neoliberal union of capitalism and democracy, the book explores how the cultural and urban revamping of Barcelona contributed to define the ideologies of the post-1989 world order. I also have written a variety of articles on contemporary Catalan literature, architecture, and politics, with special focus on the emergence of Catalan secessionism as a movement of social and political transformation.

Second, my research interests also lie in political theory, Marxism, global studies, and war theory. My book, The Survival Regime: Global War and the Political (Routledge, 2020), theorizes survival as the political logic of the fusion between global war and the world market. My hypothesis is not simply that struggling for life is the new content of politics, but rather that the globalization of war and capital entails a permanent instability that forces political life to struggle for its own existence in the form of constant intervention. The regime of survival no longer corresponds to the biopolitics of the modern state or to the neoliberal survival of the fittest. Instead, it defines a type of degree zero governmentality in which assemblages of bodies engage in conflict while simultaneously producing positive forms of life. Through a critical dialogue with various contemporary thinkers (Carlo Galli, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Carl Schmitt, among many others), my project explores the conditions that make possible the interventions of the singularities of common survival in our conjuncture.

My current book-length project, “War and Politics: An Ontological Relation,” explores a variety of philosophical theories on the enigmatic passage from contentious disorder to stabilized politics. My initial premise is that war is an ontological event, or perhaps the event, that produces new social orders of being. Thus, rather than studying theories of war from strictly political science or military perspectives, my approach is based on theoretical reflections on the power of war as a simultaneously destructive and constructive, or world-shattering and world-making, force. Even if most philosophers have written on war, only a few scholars such as Carl Schmitt, Carlo Galli, Nick Mansfield and Dimitris Vardoulakis have studied the conceptual evolution of this problematic. Drawing from their work, my comparative study aims to provide a map of the different inflections in the thinking of a long list of philosophers, from Heraclitus to Alain Badiou. The relevance—and urgency!—of my project comes from the fact that globalization has emerged as an era of permanent instability that has blurred the difference between (normal) politics and (exceptional) war.

Books

• The Survival Regime. Global War and the Political. Routledge, 2020. (Preview). 
• Thinking Barcelona. Ideologies of a Global City. Liverpool University Press, 2012. Awarded the 2013 North American Catalan Society Prize for Outstanding Work in Catalan Studies.​

Articles

• “The Global Ontology of Separation.” Discourse. Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 40.2 (Spring 2018): 188-207.
• "Survival, or, the War Logic of Global Capitalism." Décalages 2.1 (2016).
• “Urban Tellurics in Barcelona: Between a Heideggerian Rock and a Postmodern Swimming Pool.” Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 1.3 (2014): 443-60.
• "Is Catalan Separatism a Progressive Cause?" Dissidences 5.10 (2014).
• “From Elegies de Bierville to Separatism: Constituent Power or Global War?” Catalan Review 28 (2014): 3–17. (Translation into Catalan: “De les Elegies de Bierville a l’independentisme: poder constituent o guerra global?” Tropelías 22 (2014): 45-57.)
• “Gaudí Gehry Barcelona.”Cultural Critique 87 (2014): 144-61.
• "The Procrustean Bed of Class Struggle." Décalages 1.3 (2013) (Portuguese translation: "O leito de Procusto da luta de classes" LavraPalavra [2018])
• “Eugenio Trías’s Reading of Joan Maragall: from Civil Catalunya-ciutat to Postcivil Catalunya-estat.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 13.4 (2012): 323-38.
• “Pleasure against Ideology in Gabriel Ferrater.” Hispanic Review 80.3 (2012): 467-84.
• “Sketches of Contemporary Labor.” Discourse. Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 33.1 (2011): 55-74.
• "On Universalist Particularism: the Catalans and the Jews." Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. 12.1 (2011): 77-94.
• "Liberalisme i independentisme, o l'esperit treballador català." Catalan Review 24 (2010): 387-400.
• "The Great Novel of Barcelona." The Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies 6 (2008): 167-82.
• “Short Stories against Barcelona’s Urban Transformation.” Transtext(e)s Transcultures. Journal of Global Cultural Studies 3 (2007): 84-97.
•  “Visca la mort del català! Una proposta modesta per a les llengües minoritàries.” Dissidences 1.1 (2005).
• “Marià Vayreda: el carlisme reciclat i l’inconscient català.” El Contemporani13 (2004): 27-32. (Spanish version: “Marià Vayreda: el carlismo reciclado y el inconsciente catalán.” Res publica. Revista de filosofía política 13-14 (2004): 87-96.)

Book chapters

• “Precariedad política e independentismo catalán.” La imaginación hipotecada. Aportaciones al debate sobre la precariedad del presente. Eds. Palmar Álvarez-Blanco and Antonio Gómez L-Quiñones. Madrid: Libros en acción, 2016. 245-56.

Creative writing

• Treure's la feina de sobre (novel) (Edicions Sidillà, 2018).
• Ball de bastons (novel) (Cabrera de Mar: Galerada, 2014). "Article a Núvol"
• "Sandpaper Liquids." (short story) Trans. J.M. Sobrer. Web. October 9, 2013.
• El gel de bany sobre l’esponja (novel) Barcelona: Columna, 2003. Literary Prize Finalist, “La primera columna.

Talks

• Survival, or, The War Logic of Global Capitalism.

Newspaper articles

• Articles in El Punt Avui