Dr Charles des Portes

Profile

I am a Teaching Fellow in Political Theory at POLIS, and a member of the Centre for Contemporary Political Theory. I specialise in political philosophy, phenomenology, and decolonial thought.

This semester I am teaching: 

• PIED1601 – Freedom, Power, and Resistance
• PIED2601 – Revolution and Reaction (module leader)

Research interests

I work in political philosophy and my research is at the intersection of continental philosophy, decolonial thought, and political theory. Along those lines, my work has been to look at the intertwinment of political concepts with the colonial matrix, I worked on the coloniality of freedom and an alternative understanding of this concept in my PhD research. I specialise in the philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon on which I have written articles focusing on their phenomenologies. I also outlines a potential direction to conduct a decolonial existential political theory that puts politics as first philosophy. My future research looks at what is called ‘racial capitalism’ and aims to go beyond the necessary/contingency debate that animates part of the literature.

Publications:

des Portes, C. 2024. “Darkening political theory: negative dialectics and guerilla” Ethnic and Racial Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2024.2361282

des Portes, C. 2024. “Towards a decolonial political theory: Thinking from the zone of nonbeing” Philosophy and Social Criticism. https://doi.org/10.1177/01914537241229055

des Portes, C. 2022. “Hannah Arendt’s Hidden Phenomenology of the Body” Human Studies, 45, 139-156. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-021-09614-2

des Portes, C. 2024. “La fenomenología oculta del cuerpo de Hannah Arendt” in: Xolocotzi Yáñez, Á. (ed). Aspectos fenomenológicos de la tradición filosófica. Sb editorial.

Qualifications

• PhD in Political Theory, University of Leeds

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for Contemporary Political Theory