Luke Edmeads

My research interests focus on critical theory, and political and moral philosophy with a particular emphasis on the work of Theodor Adorno and Judith Butler.

My PhD comprised a critical intervention in the recent ‘turn to ethics’ in post-foundational philosophy, principally in the work of Judith Butler. The project reworked Butler’s theorisation of precarity with recourse to Adorno’s critique of morality. Re-reading Adorno’s work pushes Butler’s account of ethical life to address the implication of our relation to objects in any ethics. The thesis concludes that an ethics beginning with the primacy of the object, undoes distinctions that constrain both thought and action. This notion of ethical life extends beyond Adorno's framework, placing humans in a proliferation of relations to objects that are themselves perceived as a multiplicity of becomings. This proliferation surpasses the constraints that define the terms upon which domination is built.

My current research develops these arguments in relation to debates regarding human/non-human relations, critical ecology and the climate crisis, examining the colonial production of hierarchies of life and their ecological consequences.