Historical Writing, Material Text, and Political Theory

Kirstie McClure’s writing took Walter Benjamin’s and Hannah Arendt’s respective attention to acts of reading and remembrance to new depths, and her writing has a great deal to say to historians, political philosophers, theorists, and literary critics about what it might mean to think and write the history of thinking in time. Thought, in McClure’s treatment, is enmeshed in materiality, textual and otherwise, and context is a far richer and more dynamic concept than it is often taken to be. Just so, a history of political thinking attuned to this dynamic is not just of historiographical interest. Those of us who hope for a renewal of democratic political energy need to spend more time thinking about thinking and reading into the history of what it means to read and think anew. McClure’s writing is not just a theory of the past, but a guide to its use.