My work is currently focused primarily on modernity in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, especially as it pertains to secularization and project of overcoming metaphysics.

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Book project - Nietzsche: Death of God, Life of the Body

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This book, which is an expansion and revision of my dissertation, offers a new reading of Nietzsche's famous declaration that "God is dead," arguing that Nietzsche reads the death of God first and foremost as an opportunity to liberate the human body.

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The abstract dissertation is below, and my doctoral lecture (11/1/2022, University of Chicago), which is oriented toward a non-specialist audience, can be watched here (skip to around 1:30):

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Dissertation abstract

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"Physiology" is fundamental to Nietzsche's understanding of the human. I pose the question of how the death of God, the modern event that fundamentally alters the Western human being, can be understood physiologically. The death of God, I argue, is triggered by modernity's awakening of a physiological awareness that Christianity had suppressed, but God's death in turn catalyzes a physiological crisis: the unfettered exposure to limitless new possible values, data, and paradigms, no longer regulated by the strictures of faith, overruns the capacities of the finite, embodied human, in nihilistic modernity. Since, for Nietzsche, physiology is the study of the will to power realized as drives, the death of God and of Christianity must be understood as the death of a certain epoch of desire. I read Nietzsche’s new divinity, Dionysus, as the figurehead of a new desire in humanity, the desire for the always-already-departed source of being – namely, “Becoming.” Nietzsche’s ultimate decision to define Dionysus as the “unnameable” and necessarily “unknown” god that is more-than-Being complicates his relationship to Christianity, suggesting an affinity with certain strains of apophatic theology. The death of God is not only a death, but also a rebirth, of divinity.