Echoes of A Death: Police Violence and the Singularity of a life (fordham, 2026)

Clara Han

In neighborhoods subject to concentrated policing, deaths at the hands of police have become so pervasive that they are a feature of everyday life. But the loss of a human being—a child, sibling, parent, lover, or neighbor—cannot be normalized. It is always lived in the singular. Echoes of a Death traces how a police killing unfolds in a low-income neighborhood in Santiago, Chile that has been under a police occupation for decades as part of the country’s war on drugs and on crime.

Attending to women’s voices and actions, Han points towards a new way to study policing that departs from a saturation in state categories that continually settle the gaze on male figures and bounded institutional spaces. Instead, Echoes of a Death shows how scenes of domestic and neighborhood life are crisscrossed by policing practices, courts, municipal social services, clinics, the prison, and the media. Neither are the boundaries of the public and private defined in advance, nor is policing under democracy neatly bound off from policing under dictatorship.

Following how this death reverberates in a life, Echoes of a Death asks what it is to live in a house that has become not one’s own, in wounded kinship, and in a neighborhood marked again and again by state violence. In doing so, Han shows a method by which anthropology can render the diffused character of violence that is the signature of policing and how we can give importance to the continual work to reinhabit a life marked by it.

A Matter of Detail: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics (Toronto, 2025)

Andrew Brandel, Veena Das, Sandra Laugier and Perig Pitrou, eds.

A Matter of Detail inspires new ways of thinking about detail by bringing anthropology, philosophy, art history, and aesthetics into direct conversation. Co-editors Brandel, Das, Laugier, and Pitrou challenge a long-standing assumption that the history of detail begins with European modernity and follows a teleological course from an object of scorn to a sign of the good. In its place, they offer a history of attention to detail that draws on classical and vernacular histories and traditions found in grammar, ritual, and poetics around the world. Emphasizing detail as a method and moving between its usage as a noun (detail) and a verb (detailing) enables them to tell stories about the reassembly of detail across accidents, contingencies, and unintended consequences.

From this vantage, the book argues that details are not always small and insignificant. Rather, there is a dynamic relationship between the minute and the grand, detail and surface, which makes the proliferation of details threatening to the idea of an authoritative and integrated imagination of the whole. This expanded context generates ways of conceiving detail as a conceptual and moral mode of self-formation and being toward others, both human and non-human.

Moving Words: Literature, Memory, and Migration in Berlin (Toronto, 2023)

Andrew Brandel

In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin has re-emerged as a global city in large part thanks to its reputation as a literary city – a place where artists from around the world gather and can make a life. Moving Words foregrounds the many contexts in which life in the city of Berlin is made literary – from old neighbourhood bookshops to new reading circles, NGOs working to secure asylum for writers living in exile to specialized workshops for young migrant poets. Highlighting the differences, tensions, and contradictions of these scenes, this book reveals how literature can be both a site of domination and a resource for resisting and transforming those conditions. By attending to the everyday lives of writers, readers, booksellers, and translators, it offers a crucial new vantage point on the politics of difference in contemporary Europe, at a moment marked by historical violence, resurgent nationalism, and the fraught politics of migration.

Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork, rich historical archives, and literary analysis, Moving Words examines the different claims people make on and for literature as it carries them through the city on irregular and intersecting paths. Along the way, Brandel offers a new approach to the ethnography of literature that aims to think anthropologically about crossings in time and in space, where literature provides a footing in a world constituted by a multiplicity of real possibilities.

Le marché de la vertu: Critique de la consommation éthique (Vrin 2023)

ESTELLE FERRARESE

La propagation actuelle de pratiques de consommation prônant un « juste » prix ou des achats « responsables », fonde son succès sur une prétendue critique du capitalisme à l’échelle de la vie quotidienne.

Ce livreprend le contrepied de l’opinion dominante et démontre avec les outils de la Théorie critique que la consommation éthique collabore à l’ordre même auquel elle s’efforce d’échapper. Elle dissimule le fait que le marché désarme perpétuellement les normes morales qui y sont injectées. Elle ramène inadéquatement le capitalisme à des mécanismes psychologiques, comme une humeur prédatrice, qu’il serait possible de brider par la vertu.Elle octroie à l’intention individuelle une maîtrise absolue sur le monde, à même de le métamorphoser sans reste.Et avec sa tendance au compte – des dommages oudes efforts vertueux–, la consommation éthique concourt à la forme que le marché impose au monde, celle d’une commensurabilité généralisée.

TV-Philosophy: How TV Series Change Our Thinking (Exeter University Press 2023)

Sandra Laugier (Daniela Ginsburg Trns.)

This is the first book to explore the hold of TV series on our lives from a philosophical and ethical perspective. Sandra Laugier argues that this vital and ubiquitous expression of popular culture throughout the world is transformative in its effects on the activity of philosophy in everyday life. Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s work on film and ordinary experience, Laugier contends that we are deeply affected by the formative role played by the TV series we watch, and by the ways they become interconnected with our daily lives.

The philosophical thinking embodied in series empowers individuals in their capacity to experience, understand and appropriate elements of the world, and to educate themselves. Through our relationships with TV series, we develop our own tastes and competences, which are constitutive of our distinct experience of life. ‘Series-philosophy’ is thus a democratizing force. It also offers us a new ethics, for morality can be found not in general rules and abstract principles but in the narrative texture of characters in everyday situations facing particular ethical problems, and with whom we form attachments that result in our moral education—in sometimes surprising ways.

Slum acts (polity, 2022)

Veena Das

This book examines the ways in which knowledge that is inordinate, excessive, and overwhelming comes to mark everyday life in low-income, poor neighborhoods in Delhi with crumbling infrastructures and pervasive violence. Based on long-term ethnography in these spaces, this book provides a detailed analysis of the institutions of the state, particularly of policing and law in India. It argues that catastrophic events at the national level and the techniques of governance through which they are handled secrete forms of knowing that get embedded into the nooks and crannies of everyday life, eroding trust, sowing suspicions, and leading to an exhaustion of capacity for care. Yet the paths to survival honed within these spaces generate critique that compels us to ask how punishment and torture become routinized in democracies. Following the paths of those who struggle with these questions in these neighborhoods, the book finds that deep philosophical questions, such as the inhuman as a possibility of the human rather than its boundary, arise in the weaves of these lives and are experienced as a dimension of the social.

Seeing like a child: inheriting the korean War (Fordham, 2021)

Clara Han

Seeing Like a Child is a deeply moving narrative that showcases an unexpected voice from an established researcher. Through an unwavering commitment to a child’s perspective, Clara Han explores how the catastrophic event of the Korean War is dispersed into domestic life. Han writes from inside her childhood memories as the daughter of parents who were displaced by war, who fled from the North to the South of Korea, and whose displacement in Korea and subsequent migration to the United States implicated the fraying and suppression of kinship relations and the Korean language. At the same time, Han writes as an anthropologist whose fieldwork has taken her to the devastated worlds of her parents—to Korea and to the Korean language—allowing her, as she explains, to find and found kinship relationships that had been suppressed or broken in war and illness. A fascinating counterpoint to the project of testimony that seeks to transmit a narrative of the event to future generations, Seeing Like a Child sees the inheritance of familial memories of violence as embedded in how the child inhabits her everyday life.

Seeing Like a Child offers readers a unique experience—an intimate engagement with the emotional reality of migration and the inheritance of mass displacement and death—inviting us to explore categories such as “catastrophe,” “war,” “violence,” and “kinship” in a brand-new light.

Concepts de l'ordinaire (Éditions de la Sorbonne 2021)

Pierre Fasula et Sandra Laugier, eds.

Quelle connaissance avons-nous de l'ordinaire ? Quelle en est la grammaire ? Y a-t-il une normativité de l’ordinaire, ou relève-t-il d’une pure description ? Mais aussi plus largement, dans quelle mesure un même concept d’ordinaire permet-il de mieux comprendre ces vies que nous menons, des plus proches aux plus étrangères ? Enfin, quelle forme donner à ces vies ordinaires ? Telles sont les grandes lignes de ce volume consacré aux différentes approches conceptuelles de l’ordinaire. Depuis près de deux décennies maintenant, l’ordinaire – d’habitude minoré, ou négligé par la réflexion théorique – s’est en effet imposé comme un nouveau champ de recherches en philosophie et en sciences sociales. Ce volume collectif témoigne de la richesse et du caractère novateur de ces explorations, et cherche à établir plus fermement ce que l’on appellera les "concepts de l’ordinaire".

the politics of human life: rethinking subjectivity (routledge, 2021)

piergiorgio donatelli

This book centres on the notion of human life that lies at the foundation of contemporary thinking in the areas of ethics, law and politics.

Centrally, the book addresses the deep divide, characteristic of this thinking, between: on the one hand, those who wish to do away with any anthropological understandings of the human, and appeal to mere facts delivered by science; and, on the other hand, critics who defend an anthropological understanding of human life that is tied to traditional, teleological, metaphysics. In short: knowledge of the world is given over to the sciences and moral theory is considered to operate in a distinct, and insulated, domain. But this opposition has, Piergiorgio Donatelli argues here, outlived its usefulness. Through a discussion of the intimate human spheres of reproduction, dying and sexuality, he argues that we now live in a world characterized by new ways of living: by novel rearrangements of emotions, and by the modification, and in some cases a radical rupture in, existing ideas of human life. These shifts challenge any established separation between facts and norms, between human life and its conceptualization. As such, it is argued here, they simultaneously offer the possibility of a new, socially articulated, understanding of the relationship between subjectivity and normativity.

Living with Concepts: Anthropology in the Grip of Reality (Fordham, 2021)

Andrew Brandel and Marco Motta, eds.

This volume examines an often taken for granted concept—that of the concept itself. How do we picture what concepts are, what they do, how they arise in the course of everyday life? Challenging conventional approaches that treat concepts as mere tools at our disposal for analysis, or as straightforwardly equivalent to signs to be deciphered, the anthropologists and philosophers in this volume turn instead to the ways concepts are already intrinsically embedded in our forms of life and how they constitute the very substrate of our existence as humans who lead lives in language.

Attending to our ordinary lives with concepts requires not an ascent from the rough ground of reality into the skies of theory, but rather acceptance of the fact that thinking is congenital to living with and through concepts. The volume offers a critical and timely intervention into both contemporary philosophy and anthropological theory by unsettling the distinction between thought and reality that continues to be too often assumed and showing how the supposed need to grasp reality may be replaced by an acknowledgement that we are in its grip.

Textures of the Ordinary: Doing anthropology after wittgenstein (Fordham University Press 2020)

veena Das

How might we speak of human life amid violence, deprivation, or disease so intrusive as to put the idea of the human into question? How can scholarship and advocacy address new forms of war or the slow, corrosive violence that belie democracy's promise to mitigate human suffering? To Veena Das, the answers to these question lie not in foundational ideas about human nature but in a close attention to the diverse ways in which the natural and the social mutually absorb each other on a daily basis. 

Textures of the Ordinary shows how anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy in the exploration of everyday life. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture aligns ethnography with the anthropological tone in Wittgenstein and Cavell, as well as in literary texts. 

Das shows that doing anthropology after Wittgenstein does not consist in taking over a new set of terms such as forms of life, language games, or private language from Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Instead, we must learn to see what eludes us in the everyday precisely because it is before our eyes. The book shows different routes of return to the everyday as it is corroded not only by catastrophic events but also by repetitive and routine violence within everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and as the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence.

Textures of the Ordinary offers a model of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable. With questions returned to repeatedly throughout the text and over a lifetime, this book is an intellectually intimate invitation into the ordinary, that which is most simple yet most difficult to perceive in our lives.

——

Events:

American Philosophical Association Meetings, January 9-11, 2020, Philadelphia

Author Meets Critics: Veena Das, Textures of the Ordinary

Chair: Alice Crary (New School for Social Research)

Critics: Sandra Laugier (Paris 1 Sorbonne) and Penelope Deutscher (Northwestern University)

Author: Veena Das (Johns Hopkins University)

la fragilité du souci de autres (ENS éditiones 2018)

Estelle Ferrarese

Ce livre renouvelle et acère la théorie critique par le féminisme. L’auteure interroge la philosophie sociale de Theodor W. Adorno au moyen de certaines des idées défendues par les théories du care afin de penser la fragilité sociale du souci des autres et ses enjeux politiques. Elle montre que la forme de vie capitaliste, tendue par une indifférence généralisée, n’en produit pas moins une attention à autrui compartimentée, limitée à des tâches et à des domaines bien particuliers et impartie aux femmes.

Formes de Vie (CNRS Editions 2018)

Estelle Ferrarese et Sandra Laugier

La notion de « formes de vie » a émergé il y a une dizaine d’années et circule dans des domaines variés, de la biologie à la philosophie en passant par la sociologie, la science politique et l’anthropologie.

Mais qu’entendre par « formes de vie »? Un ensemble de pratiques, d’usages de nature variée, qui donnent à la vie commune des caractéres propres, pour ainsi dire diffus, explicitement ou implicitement présents dans les croyances, la langue, les institutions, les modes d’action,

les valeurs. Une forme de vie est toujours, en ce sens, particulière, c’est pourquoi il existe des formes de vie, plus qu’une forme de vie.

De l é’tude de ses divers sens chez des auteurs aussi différents qu’ Adorno et Wittgenstein à sa portée critique et politique et à ses incidences éthiques, cet ouvrage déploie toutes les dimensions de cette nouvelle approche. En particulier, la porosité entre les sphères privée, sociale, économique et politique, et la nouvelle articulation du sociale
et du biologique.

how capitalism Forms Our lives (Journal for cultural research 2018)

reprinted by routledge 2019

Alyson Cole and Estelle Ferrarese, eds.

Table of Contents

Alyson Cole and Estelle Ferrarese, “How capitalism forms our lives”

Max Horkheimer, “The State of Contemporary Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research (1931)”

Rahel Jaeggi, “Economy as social practice”

Estelle Ferrarese, “The use of bodies. Agamben’s idea of a non-capitalist form of life”

David Harvey, “Universal alienation”

Frances Fox Piven, “The enduring regulation of the poor”

Daniele Lorenzini, “Governmentality, subjectivity, and the neoliberal form of life”

Alyson Cole, “The subject of objects: Marx, new materialism, & queer forms of life”

Victoria Hattam, “The whiteness of capital”

Cedric G. Johnson, “Beyond the barricades: class interest and actually existing black life”

Timothée Haug, “The capitalist metabolism: an unachieved subsumption of life under the value-form”

Sharon P. Holland, “Vocabularies of vulnerability”

Inventer des formes de vie (Multitudes 2018)

Sandra Laugier ed.

La démocratie comme enquête et comme forme de vie
La notion de forme de vie se retrouve aujourd’hui dans des contextes théoriques divers – Théorie critique, Wittgenstein, biopolitique, étude des styles et anthropologies de la vie. Elle permet de penser de nouvelles formes de critique et d’éthique dans un monde touché par le changement global et la radicalisation des inégalités sociales, sanitaires et environnementales. Au-delà de la vulnérabilité des formes de (la) vie humaine, apparue en situations de désastre ou de dénuement, le concept de formes de vie s’est également développé à l’articulation du social et de la vie pour décrire les diverses façons de faire inventivité et créer de nouvelles formes de vie. Cette présentation vise à rendre compte de la transformation en cours que signale cet usage dans des domaines tels le travail, la critique sociale ou l’innovation démocratique et les lieux où s’expérimentent de nouvelles formes de vie démocratique.

the subject of objects: Marx, new materialism, & queer forms of life (Journal for cultural research 2018)

alyson cole

This article examines two interrelated themes in the scholarship categorized as ‘new materialism’: first, the aim to undermine the subject/object distinction; second, the proposition that agency exists across the material world. While new materialists, such as Jane Bennett, conceive of their approach as an intervention against the injurious effects of capitalism, I argue that destabilizing the object/subject binary and endowing inanimate objects with vitality and agency is actually a constitutive feature of capitalism itself. To illustrate this point, I turn to Marx’s analysis, providing a queer reading of his theorization of commodities. Revisting Marx’s account of commodity fetishism in tandem with new materialism yields fresh insights into the logics of capitalism, specifically, the manner in which it thrives on concurrently producing and erasing subjectivities, thereby distorting social materiality and material sociality.

the politics of vulnerability (routledge 2017)

estelle ferrarese, ed.

Table of Contents

Estelle Ferrarese, “Vulnerability: A Concept with Which to Undo the World As It Is?”

Robert Castel, “The Rise of Uncertainties”

Veena Das, “The Boundaries of the "We:" Cruelty, Responsibility and Forms of Life”

Penelope Deutscher, “On the Whole We Don’t:" Michel Foucault, Veena Das and Sexual Violence”

Sandra Laugier, “Politics of Vulnerability and Responsibility for Ordinary Others”

Estelle Ferrarese, “The Vulnerable and the Political: On the Seeming Impossibility of Thinking Vulnerability and the Political Together and Its Consequences”

Noémi Michel, “Accounts of Injury as Misappropriations of Race: Towards a Critical Black Politics of Vulnerability”

Alyson Cole, “All of Us Are Vulnerable, But Some Are More Vulnerable than Others: The Political Ambiguity of Vulnerability Studies, an Ambivalent Critique”

All of Us are Vulnerable, But Some are More Vulnerable Than Others: The Political Ambiguity of Vulnerability Studies, An Ambivalent Critique (Critical Horizons 2016)

Republished in Turkish “Hempimiz Yaralanabirliriz, Ama Bazilari Digerlerinden Daha Cok Yaralanbilirlik” Cogito (Yaz 2017)

This paper raises several concerns about vulnerability as an alternative language to conceptualize injustice and politicize its attendant injuries. First, the project of resignifying “vulnerability” by emphasizing its universality and amplifying its generative capacity, I suggest, might dilute perceptions of inequality and muddle important distinctions among specific vulnerabilities, as well as differences between those who are injurable and those who are already injured. Vulnerability scholars, moreover, have yet to elaborate the path from acknowledging constitutive vulnerability to addressing concrete injustices. Second, vulnerability studies respond to, and have been shaped by, debates in the 1980s and 1990s over oppression, identity and agency. This genealogy needs to be acknowledged and evaluated. As I demonstrate, prominent theorists define vulnerability in contradistinction to victimization, adopting neo-liberal formulations of victims and victimhood. Finally, I turn to address the politics of vulnerability. At issue are not simply matters of utility or programmes for implementation, but the fraught relationship among ontology, ethics and politics, which I address through an engagement with Rancière's conception of the political and the case of the Black Lives Matter movement.

No Place for Grief: Martyrs, Prisoners, and Mourning in Contemporary Palestine (Penn Press, 2016)

Lotte Buch Segal 

Westerners 'know' Palestine through images of war and people in immediate distress. Yet this focus has as its consequence that other, less spectacular stories of daily distress are rarely told. Those seldom noticed are the women behind the men who engage in armed resistance against the military occupation: wives of the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention and the widows of the martyrs. In Palestine, being related to a detainee serving a sentence for participation in the resistance activities against Israel is a source of pride. Consequently, the wives of detainees are expected to sustain these relationships through steadfast endurance, no matter the effects upon the marriage or family. Often people, media, and academic studies address the dramatic violence and direct affliction of the Palestinians. Lotte Buch Segal takes a different approach, and offers a glimpse of the lives, and the contradictory emotions, of the families of both detainees and martyrs through an in-depth ethnographic investigation.

No Place for Grief asks us to think about what it means to grieve when that which is grieved does not lend itself to a language of loss and mourning. What does it mean to "endure" when ordinary life is engulfed by the emotional labor required to withstand the pressures placed on Palestinian families by sustained imprisonment and bereavement? Despite an elaborate repertoire of narrative styles, laments, poetry, and performance of bodily gestures through which mourning can be articulated, including the mourning tied to a political cause, Buch Segal contends that these forms of expression are inadequate to the sorrow endured by detainees' wives. No Place for Grief reveals a new language that describes the entanglement of absence and intimacy, endurance and everyday life, and advances an understanding of loss, mourning, and grief in contemporary Palestine.

Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium (UC Press, 2015)

Veena Das and Clara Han, eds. 

Taking a novel approach to the contradictory impulses of violence and care, illness and healing, this book radically shifts the way we think of the interrelations of institutions and experiences in a globalizing world. Living and Dying in the Contemporary World is not just another reader in medical anthropology but a true tour de force—a deep exploration of all that makes life unbearable and yet livable through the labor of ordinary people.

This book comprises forty-four chapters by scholars whose ethnographic and historical work is conducted around the globe, including South Asia, East Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Bringing together the work of established scholars with the vibrant voices of younger scholars, Living and Dying in the Contemporary World will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists, health scientists, scholars of religion, and all who are curious about how to relate to the rapidly changing institutions and experiences in an ever more connected world.

Verbicide. D’une vulnérabilité qui n’ose dire son nom / Verbicide: The Vulnerability that Dare Not Speak Its Name (Les Cahiers du Genre 2015)

alyson cole

This article explores the discursive process that shaped contemporary understandings of vulnerability, highlighting recurrent attempts to rework the relationship between victimization and blame. I trace uses of the phrase “blaming the victim,” from sociologist William Ryan’s 1970 coinage in his critique of efforts to assist vulnerable populations to the contemporary conservative campaigns against “victim politics.” The blame/victim nexus also takes us to the science of victimology that emerged in the aftermath of the WWII to gauge “victim precipitation,” the works of psychologist Melvin Lerner who documented that individuals in fact do blame victims, feminists’ protests against “blaming the rape victim,” and finally the Victims’ Rights Movement. This genealogy of the rhetorical work of the phrase “blaming the victim” and it depoliticizing effects demonstrates how causes formulated in terms of victimhood increasingly concentrate on the therapeutic utility of blaming, often occluding the material consequences of victimization or its remedy.