Research

My research broadly examines capitalist societies by bringing together contemporary political theory, political economy and labor politics. In contrast with idealist and atomistic conceptions, my work regards our current condition as fundamentally material and social. Moreover, my intellectual framework attends to legal mediations and gender relations as further facets of my main objects of study. 

I take political economy to be indissociable from political theory, and reject the assumption according to which the "political" and the "economic" constitute two separate spheres. Instead, my work emphasizes the political, social and legal contexts of economic life and departs from the individualized and individualist homo œconomicus. This focus also integrates the relationship between law, politics, and society, whereby the legal aspect of our contemporary lives comes not only from the authoritative State level or the Constitution, but also seeps through the ordinary and the mundane. This informs my approach to political theory as a whole and my interpretation of canonical political theory texts, including but not limited to Ancient democratic theory, social contract theory, or theories of social justice. 

Book Project - The Ends Of Capitalist Labor

My dissertation, structured as a first book project, utilizes the polysemy of "end" to examine the boundaries, purposes, and limits of labor under capitalism. It argues that only a technical and historicized definition of labor under capitalism can lead us to an accurate analysis of contemporary societies. My opening chapter develops a guideline to assess whether an activity qualifies as labor under capitalism and defines capitalist labor as taking three forms: wage labor; the commodity labor-power, exchanged between the worker and the employer; and surplus-value-positing labor. Furthermore, my project highlights the peculiar position of the labor-power commodity and shows that labor-power represents a doubly unique commodity. Indeed, not only does labor-power create more value, but also it evades some aspects reigning over every other capitalist commodity.

My work not only contributes to topical debates in political theory, but also my scholarly motivation lies in finding explanations for our contemporary world relevant to political science, humanities and social sciences more broadly. In that sense, the theory laid out in the first chapter entails far-ranging implications for several fields. Based on the argument that machinery cannot create value, I interrogate the possibility of large-scale automation and claim that current and foreseeable technological innovations remain capitalist in their logic and will not put an end to either human labor or capitalism as a mode of production. My dissertation compares policies of Employer of Last Resort (ELR) and Universal Basic Income (UBI) in their capacity to reduce or eliminate poverty under capitalism. It favors the former due to their fitting accent on employment, and thus labor, when the latter constitute at best a band-aid on poverty. In a different but complementary vein, the closing chapter studies prison labor in contemporary France and reveals that capitalism has transformed the French penal system in one that aims at rehabilitating persons primarily as workers.