Alex Dubilet
Assistant Professor of English
An interdisciplinary scholar by training and sensibility, I draw on methods and materials from a wide range of scholarly fields, including critical theory, continental philosophy (esp. philosophy of religion), radical political theory, political theology, black studies, post-colonial studies, literary studies, and religious studies (esp. critical approaches to Christianity, mysticism, and secularism).
Resisting dominant periodization protocols, my current book project, Interminable Disorder, constructs an expansive theologico-political genealogy of insurgent thought and action by creatively engaging a wide array of theorists, ranging from Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt, Jacob Taubes, and Michel Foucault to Sylvia Wynter, Reiner Schürmann, Saidiya Hartman, and Fred Moten. Combining literary-hermeneutic, genealogical-historical, and speculative-theoretical modes of reading and writing, it reopens the question of Christianity’s relation to secular modernity and offers new perspectives on fundamental political categories (e.g. antagonism, civil war, the enemy) and on the basic frameworks that narrate the (dis)continuity of the theological and the political (e.g. secularization, periodization, supersession). Taking up and expansively rethinking the contemporary concept of destituent power, Interminable Disorder develops the insight that the closure of the long epoch of revolutionary modernity requires us to critically reassess not only the dialectic of constituent power (of the people or the nation) and constituted power (of the state) but also the ontological and political presuppositions of secularism. Working across disciplinary partitions, I retrieve a transhistorical multiplicity of destituent voices disqualified by revolutionary modernity, including Gnostic refusals of the world and their modern afterlives, mystical subversions of hierarchy and heretical claims of antinomian sinlessness, levelling equality enacted by peasants in revolt and slave rebellions’ insurrectionary and withdrawing tendencies. Their insurgent refusals of political order gives the book its title, an homage to the “amazing and beautiful ode to disorder” that is Cedric Robinson’s The Terms of Order. Culminating with a radically new theorization of black popular insurgency across the Haitian Revolution, Interminable Disorder demonstrates two fundamental truths: law is an apparatus of counterinsurgency even when it speaks the language of liberation and fidelity to the mass self-emancipation of the enslaved requires relinquishing our treasured investments in revolution, if it is not to betray itself and its object.
I have co-edited two volumes that investigate the nature and significance of political theology, a topic of central importance to Interminable Disorder: Political Theology Reimagined, eds. Alex Dubilet and Vincent Lloyd, (Duke University Press, 2025) and Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology, eds. Kirill Chepurin and Alex Dubilet (Fordham University Press, 2021). I have also published a number of essays that articulate aspects of Interminable Disorder in preliminary form: “Unrealizing the Haitian Revolution: On Popular Insurgency and Destituent Power,” Political Theology (forthcoming, Spring 2026); “Foucault, Our Contemporary,” boundary 2, 52:4 (2025); “Political Theology's Antagonisms: Between Stasis and Gnosis,” (2025); “A Political Theology of Interpellation: On Subjection, Individuation, and Becoming Nothing,” Cultural Critique 122 (2024); “The Just without Justification: On Meister Eckhart and Political Theology,” postmedieval, 13:1-2 (2022); “An Immanence without the World: On Dispossession, Nothingness, and Secularity,” Qui Parle, 30:1 (2021); and “On the General Secular Contradiction: Secularization, Christianity, and Political Theology,” (2021).
My current work follows from my first book, The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern (Fordham University Press, 2018). Against two dominant ethical paradigms, Levinas’s ethics of the other and Foucault’s ethics of self-cultivation, it theorizes an ethics of self-emptying (or kenosis), which reveals the immanence of an impersonal and dispossessed life without a why. Rather than align immanence with the enclosures of the subject, The Self-Emptying Subject draws on Christian mystical theology, modern philosophy, and contemporary theories of the subject to rethink immanence as what precedes and exceeds the very difference between the (human) self and the (divine) other, between the subject and transcendence.
Previously, I co-translated into English (with Jessie Hock) two books by François Laruelle: General Theory of Victims (Polity Press, 2015) and A Biography of Ordinary Man: On Authorities and Minorities (Polity Press, 2018). I was the co-director of the Contemporary in Theory and the Rereading French Theory seminars at Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. In addition, I published essays (with Kirill Chepurin) speculatively reinterpreting Russian philosophical thought in light of broader contemporary theoretical debates: “Out of the Cemetery of the Earth, a Resurrective Commons: Nikolai Fedorov’s Common Task against the Biopolitics of Modernity” (CR: The New Centennial Review 23:2 2023); “Russia’s Atopic Nothingness: Ungrounding the World-Historical Whole with Pyotr Chaadaev,” (Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 24:6 2019); and “Sovereign Nothingness: Pyotr Chaadaev’s Political Theology,” (Theory & Event 22:2 2019).
Once finished with Interminable Disorder, I plan to return to a number of currently dormant projects. These include: a theoretical investigation of the affirmation of poverty as a minor gesture that traverses the epistemological and political disjunctures of modernity (via readings of medieval and modern figures, ranging from Meister Eckhart, Marguerite Porete, the Spiritual Franciscans, and Thomas Müntzer to Karl Marx, Clarice Lispector, Huey Newton, and Stefano Harney & Fred Moten); a speculative reinterpretation of Andrei Platonov’s work, especially his magnum opus Chevengur, within a broader articulation of communist aesthetics; a (re)construction of the entwined matrices of (counter)revolution, (counter)terrorism, and (counter)insurgency; a theoretical reconsideration of mysticism’s relation to critique in light of modernity’s progressive temporalities; a theorization of the glossolalia of the flesh in Aleksei German’s 1998 Khrustalyov, My Car!; a formulation of the deviant afterlives of mystical whylessness in politics and philosophy; a reassessment of the figure of the holy fool; and (with Joseph Albernaz) an exploration of the interwoven genealogies of Gnosticism and communism.
In the English Department, I teach undergraduate courses such as “Modernity, Religion, Critique,” “Genres of Insurrection,” “Revolution, Abolition, Modernity: The Haitian Revolution,” “Critical Theory: Possession and Dispossession in Modernity,” “Mysticism and Literature,” “On Living and Thinking,” “Rhetoric of Revolution,” “Critical Theory: History of Violence / Violence of History,” and “Karl Marx and Michel Foucault.” On the graduate level, I have taught: “Modernity and Revolution” (Spring 2026), “Political Theology and the Question of Modernity” (Spring 2025), “Civil War, General Antagonism, and Colonial Modernity,” and (with Ben Tran) “Capitalism and Racialization” & “Race and Dis/Possession.”
I have also regularly taught undergraduate political theory courses in Political Science, including “Radical Political Theory,” “Power and Resistance,” “Politics of Capitalism,” “Subject and Power: Michel Foucault,” and “Religion and Politics.”
Some of my published work is available at: https://vanderbilt.academia.edu/AlexDubilet. Please feel free to email me if you need copies of my other work.