Deconstruction, property, and political resistance

Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

Abstract

This thesis reconceptualises the politics of resistance by rethinking property across a range of traditions. It rethinks property, deconstruction, the commons, democracy, and Black radicalism in novel ways to theorise how political resistance disrupts and remakes social orders that distribute inequality. In recent years, wide ranging scholarship in critical theory, decolonial legal theory, and feminist philosophy has drawn attention to how the partition and allocation of land, resources, political infrastructure and precarity relies on categorisations of being and subjectivity. These order and distribute a raft of interrelated oppressions and inequalities. In short, the relationship between ontology and political logics of appropriation has been made explicit. This thesis intervenes in this scholarship as well as Black Studies, the Black radical tradition, Indigenous scholarship, and post-Marxism to theorise political resistance in ways this literature has yet to consider. I reconceptualise Jacques Derrida’s under-developed notion of ex appropriation to think how political resistance unsettles the relationship between logics of appropriation and ontology, disrupting the distribution of inequality, and remaking social relations. This rearticulation of ex-appropriation responds to the anti-foundational analysis of property I develop. This demonstrates the limited character of deterministic analyses of property. I argue that property is not the “base” of material inequality but participates in interrelated oppressions and inequalities. Colonial incursions, projects of racialisation, gendered violence, ethno-nationalisms, wage theft, financial extractivism, and ecological breakdown are overdetermined, but related forms of oppression. I contribute to scholarship on the commons, democracy, and theories of Blackness by analysing – in turn – the extent to which each disrupts the reproduction of these interrelated oppressions through what I term ex-appropriation. I conclude that ex-appropriation provides fertile ground for developing democracy and theories of Blackness in ways that disrupt the violent relationship between logics of appropriation and modes of being.
Date of AwardJan 2025
Original languageEnglish
Awarding Institution
  • University of Brighton
SupervisorMark Devenney (Supervisor), Clare Woodford (Supervisor) & German Primera Villamizar (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • resistance
  • ownership
  • property
  • proprietary
  • deconstruction
  • colonialism
  • the commons
  • democracy
  • black radicalism

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