She is a professor of German Studies and founding director of the Critical Theory Program at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN.
[2] She argues that this line of thought entails a radical reconceptualization of Being or appearance,[3] and further, that this new ontology works "not simply to overturn the Platonic hierarchy but collapses it as obsolete.
[7] Although both share a focus on human life as it is inscribed by power, Foucauldian biopolitics and Lacanian psychoanalysis have remained isolated from and even opposed to one another.
In this book, Kordela goes beyond both representationalism (or correlationism) and the attempts to challenge it—such as Heidegger’s “disclosure of being,” Alain Badiou’s return to Platonism, Deleuze’s “expressionism,” speculative materialism (e.g., Quentin Meillassoux), various kinds of object-orientated ontology, etc.—by grounding a parallelism or homology between words and things (indexed by the term epistemontology) on Spinozan monism and its subsequent formulation in Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism (in this context the book engages closely also with Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s work).
This surplus to structure leads to a Spinozan-Marxian-Lacanian revision of the concept of biopower, far beyond Foucault’s reduction of bios to the discursive inscription of the biological body and population.