Political Science

Alberto is a seventh-year Ph.D. candidate specializing in political theory with a secondary specialization in American politics. He holds a B.A. with Honours and an M.A. from The University of British Columbia, both in Political Science. His research and teaching focus on early modern Spanish and British political thought, contemporary democratic theory, ordinary language philosophy, and political theory in literature. Methodologically, he relies on hermeneutics and phenomenology to critically interpret works of literature, popular culture, and political texts. In addition to his work in the Political Science Department, Alberto was part of the leadership team for the Stone Inequality Initiative and a Collaborative Humanities Fellow at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, both at Brown.

Alberto’s dissertation, Reality Checking Democracy: Quixotic Encounters with Political Theory, is concerned with the crises of reality faced by contemporary democratic societies. One of the expressions such crises take is that of radical skepticism over our public realm and institutions. From public health, education, and news media to the most basic democratic procedures, a significant portion of citizens seem to disavow the gravitational pull of public things by turning towards the solipsism of their ‘private’ experience. What can democracies do when the opinions of citizens become incommensurably divergent, such that people seem to be describing and living in a different reality altogether?

Concerns about increasingly diverse social orders in which people and communities perceive things in radically different ways are not new. Such worry was a pressing issue across Europe during the long 17^th century. Like today, the 17^th century was especially skeptical about the possibility of sense-making in plurality and making sense of plurality. Like today, the 17^th century saw a rapidly changing media ecosystem that upended extant notions of ‘the real,’ thereby creating new tensions between appearance and reality and between fiction and truth. It is no surprise, then, that the 17^th century gave us the character—don Quijote—and the language—quixotism—to understand those obsessed with fiction at the expense of reality.

What might don Quijote and the responses he elicited among contemporary readers have to teach democratic politics and political theory today? The dissertation looks at how early-modern thinkers—Hobbes, Locke, Cervantes, Gracián, and Nebrija—approached quixotism, the unwillingness to tell reality and fiction apart, as either a problem to be solved or a condition to be navigated. The objectivists—represented by the British empiricists Hobbes and Locke—are scandalized by Quijotes’ investments in irreality and seek to discipline Quijote figures by creating an Archimedean point; an ‘objective’ position that exists outside of the field of representation and from which an adequate judgment can be generated. For the impartialists—represented by the Spanish Baroque thinkers Miguel de Cervantes and Baltasar Gracián, as well as the 20^th century thinkers Arendt, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty—the problem with Quijotes is not their investment with fiction per se, but rather their mode of investment. Quijotes are hermetically sealed in the solipsism of their ‘private’ experience such that they refuse to ‘reality check’ with others; they refuse to see what others see. The impartialists offer us a Baroque countertradition of perception, one that does not seek Archimedean objectivity but playful impartiality—the ability to take on different spectatorial positions, a willingness and disposition to see things under different aspects and grammars. Instead of withdrawing from plurality and publicity in favor of an ‘objective’ position, these thinkers aim to, borrowing from Arendt, “train the imagination to go visiting” so that we can reevaluate the habits, concepts, and affects that we use when making sense, thereby enabling us to cultivate more robust forms of democratic citizenship.

Job Market Paper Title

Don Quijote and the Scandal of Fiction or The Quixotism of Sovereignty

Job Market Paper Abstract

Thomas Hobbes and Antonio de Nebrija considered the reading of fiction in the early modern period as a crisis of authority. Readers of fiction—what I term here “Quijote figures” after Miguel de Cervantes’ titular character, don Quijote—undermine sovereign power with their unruly use of words. In response, Hobbes and Nebrija sought to discipline Quijote figures and guarantee sovereign power by vacating the inconstancy of language at the level of grammar. But the sovereigntists’ quest for a uniform language transforms the sovereigntists into the figure they seek to discipline. Just like don Quijote, who takes the romances he reads as singularly and immediately authoritative, the subjects of sovereignty must also take the sovereign’s language as singularly and immediately authoritative. Hobbesian–Nebrijan sovereignty creates quixotic subjects. I show how the quixotism of sovereignty has deleterious consequences for democratic politics today by reading key passages of Cervantes’s el Quijote alongside Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work on aspect perception. The quixotism of sovereignty is also reflected in various executive orders of the current Trump administration, especially those that seek to abolish gender. Sovereigntists like Hobbes, Nebrija, and Trump are scandalized by people’s engagement with plurality and disparage such engagement by casting plurality as a sort of ‘fiction.’