Philosophy, Technology,
and the Body—Toward Justice

I am a media philosopher whose research intersects the concepts of body, politics, and technology to address current algorithmic rationality in terms of operations of identification and (mis)recognition that are closely connected to mechanisms of value extraction and selective exposure to risks. I am currently a Thyssen Fellow at KWI (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institute, Essen, Germany) and an associate at the SFB Virtuelle Lebenswelten (Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany). Extending my theory of touch as a condition for the emergence of meaning in my first book Theorie des graphischen Felds [A Theory of the Graphic Field] (Diaphanes, 2020), I am now writing my second monograph, “Toward a Hauntology of Touch.” Relying on poststructuralism, political philosophy, black studies, and the philosophy of technology, I am working through the concept of “touch” to uncover and describe modern and contemporary culture-technical operations that shape the contact between bodies and that determine forms of sociality marked by subjection, extraction, and dispossession. Instead, what I call the “hauntology of touch” proposes a non- or less violent form of dispossessed subjectivity.

Workshop: “New Reading Scenes: On Machine Reading and Reading Machine Learning Research” (February 27–28, 2025)

Workshop at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen, Germany. Conception and Organization by Katia Schwerzmann. (Exposé)

Upcoming Papers

“From Enclosure to Foreclosure and Beyond: Opening AI’s Totalizing Logic.” (Under review at AI & Society)

with Campolo, Alex. ‘“Desired Behaviors’: the Problem of Alignment and the Emergence of a Machine Learning Ethics.” (Under review at AI & Society)

“Counting, Recounting, and Accounting for—Machine Learning’s Ways of Future-Making.”

Recent Papers

with Campolo, Alexander C. “From Rules to Examples. Machine Learning’s Type of Authority.” Big Data & Society 10, no. 2 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231188725.

with Cachoian-Schanz, Deanna. “‘One Unique You’: Affective Attachments and DNA-Testing as Ethnotechnological Apparatus.” Social Text 41, no. 1 (2023): 71–97. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10174982.