Dr Ben Turner , BA (Kent), PhD (Kent)

Profile

Before joining Queen Mary, I worked at the University of Kent where I also completed my PhD. My doctoral research focused on the relationship between technology and judgement in the work of Bernard Stiegler, which was the subject of my first book: Returning to Judgement: Bernard Stiegler and Continental Political Theory. More widely, my research interests cut across the politics and philosophy of technology, the political theory of work and post-work, and the conditions of political judgement. Whilst I work primary within continental political theory, I actively look for ways to think about and push beyond its limits by drawing on material from anthropology, analytical political theory and philosophy, social epistemology, and empirically informed political theory.

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Teaching

POL355 Globalization

POL264 Modern Political Thought 2

Research

Research Interests:

My research interests cut across the politics of technology, work and post-work, and political judgement. I explore these themes from a critical perspective within continental political theory: I am interested in pushing at the boundaries of this tradition, drawing on material from anthropology, analytic philosophy, social epistemology, and empirical political theory to do so.

My PhD research provided the first extensive account of the relevance of the philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler to political theory. I developed this work in my first book Returning to Judgement: Bernard Stiegler and Continental Political Theory. There I give the first, and currently only, extensive account of Stiegler’s work for political theorists, showing how he breaks with the reticence towards political judgement, decision making, and totalisation in the continental tradition. I argue that he provides a unique account of how to balance totalising judgement with openness, using, but also diverging, from the intellectual tools of continental political thought.

Building on this work, I have developed an in interest in the implicit judgements that shape the claims made by political theorists. I have used resources from anthropology to explore the limits of concepts like culture and antagonism, and I have also explored the relevance of realism, comparative political theory, and the ethnographic sensibility in political thought to the ongoing methodological turn in the discipline.

I am currently working on questions relating to the political nature of work. In a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, ‘Imagining Life Beyond Work: Post-Work as a Tradition of Political Thought,’ I am investigating the extent to which post-work thought represents a distinct tradition that breaks with existing understandings of work in political theory. My intention is to show that post-work thought is characterised by a rich set of normative and speculative claims that are not reducible to the mistaken view that post-work thinkers rely on the unlikely idea that automation will end work. Alongside this project, I am drawing on my research on method in political theory to explore the feasibility constraints that automated management techniques place upon proposals for workplace democracy.

Examples of research funding:

2024-2026 Leverhulme Project Grant: ‘Imagining Life Beyond Work: Post-Work as a Tradition of Political Thought’

2013-2017 ESRC 3+1 Doctoral Scholarship

Publications

Books

Returning to Judgment: Bernard Stiegler and Continental Political Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2023.

Articles

‘Situating Realism, the Ethnographic Sensibility, and Comparative Political Theory within the Methodological Turn in Political Theory’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations. Online First 2024.

‘“Above and Beyond the Market”: The Family, Social Reproduction and Conservatism in Bernard Stiegler’s Politics of Work.’ Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 26, no. 6 (2021): 68-85.

w/ Lucas Van Miders ‘Introduction: Why Should Political Theorists Care About Work?’ Theory & Event 24, no. 4 (2021): 1035-1049.

‘The Limits of Culture in Political Theory: A Critique of Multiculturalism from the Perspective of Anthropology’s Ontological Turn.’ European Journal of Political Theory 20, no. 2 (2021): 252-271.

‘From Resistance to Invention in the Politics of the Impossible: Bernard Stiegler’s Political Reading of Maurice Blanchot.’ Contemporary Political Theory 18, no. 1 (2019): 43-64.

‘Affinity and Antagonism: Structuralism, Comparison and Transformation in Pluralist Political Ontology.’ Philosophy & Social Criticism 45, no. 1 (2019): 27-49.

‘Science and Ideology Revisited: Necessity, Contingency and the Critique of Ideologies in Meillassoux and Malabou.’ Theory & Event 22, no. 4 (2018): 865-890.

‘Ideology and Post-Structuralism after Bernard Stiegler.’ Journal of Political Ideologies 22, no. 1 (2017): 92–110.

‘Life and the Technical Transformation of Différance: Stiegler and the Noopolitics of Becoming Non-Inhuman.’ Derrida Today 9, no. 2 (2016): 177–98.

Book Chapters

‘Post-Work and the Problem of Recognition: A Defence of Working Time Reduction.’ In Debating a Post-Work Future: Perspectives from Philosophy and the Social Sciences, edited by Kory P. Schaff, Michael Cholbi, Jean-Phillipe Deranty & Denise Celentano. London: Routledge, 2024.

‘Politicising the Epoché: Bernard Stiegler and the Politics of Epochal Suspension.’ In The Subject(s) of Phenomenology: Rereading Husserl, edited by Iulian Apostolescu, pp. 341-354. Dordrecht: Springer, 2020.

Special Issues/Edited Symposia

w/ Lucas Van Milders. ‘Political Theory and the Future of Work.’ Edited Symposium in Theory & Event 14, no. 4 (2021).

Book Reviews

‘Review: “Digital Working Lives: Worker Autonomy and the Gig-Economy.”’ Contemporary Political Theory 23, no. 2 (2023): 344-347.

‘Review: “Across the Great Divide: Between Analytic and Continental Political Theory.”’ Phenomenological Reviews. https://reviews.ophen.org/2020/07/22/jeremy-arnold-across-the-great-divide-between-analytic-and-continental-political-theory/

‘Review: “The Attention Economy: Labour, Time and Power in Cognitive Capitalism.”’ Theory, Culture & Society 35, no. 7-8 (2018): 331-337,

• Turner B (2024). Situating realism, the ethnographic sensibility, and comparative political theory within the methodological turn in political theory.

  
  

  DOI: 10.1177/13691481241249009

  
  

  QMRO: https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/99796
• Turner B (2024). Post-Work and the Problem of Recognition: A Defence of Working Time Reduction.

  
  

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  QMRO:
• Turner B (2023). Returning to Judgment Bernard Stiegler and Continental Political Theory.

  
  

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• Turner B (2024). Digital working lives: worker autonomy and the gig-economy.

  
  

  DOI: 10.1057/s41296-023-00619-3

  
  

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• Turner B (2021). “Above and Beyond the Market”: The Family, Social Reproduction, and Conservatism in Bernard Stiegler’s Politics of Work.

  
  

  DOI: 10.1080/0969725x.2021.1988379

  
  

  QMRO: https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/99780
• Turner B, Van Milders L (2021). Introduction: Why Should Political Theorists Care About Work?.

  
  

  DOI: 10.1353/tae.2021.0057

  
  

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• Turner B . J. Arnold, Across the great divide.

  
  

  DOI: 10.19079/pr.6.46

  
  

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• Turner B (2020). Politicising the Epokhé: Bernard Stiegler and the Politics of Epochal Suspension.

  
  

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• Turner B (2018). Review: Claudio Celis Bueno, The Attention Economy: Labour, Time and Power in Cognitive Capitalism.

  
  

  DOI: 10.1177/0263276418799880

  
  

  QMRO:
• Turner B (2018). Science and Ideology Revisited: Necessity, Contingency and the Critique of Ideologies in Meillassoux and Malabou.

  
  

  DOI: 10.1353/tae.2018.0053

  
  

  QMRO:

Supervision

I would be interested in supervising PhD students working on Bernard Stiegler or using his philosophy to address issues in both the politics of technology and political theory more widely. I would also be happy to supervise projects in the political theory of work and post-work, the politics of technology and in continental political theory broadly understood.