About

Dean P Mathiowetz is an Associate Professor in the Division of Social Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, affiliated with the Politics Department and the History of Consciousness Department. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from the University of Minnesota. His research brings together themes of insurgent democracy, Black radicalism, political economy, and the politics of enjoyment and material life, exploring how collective practices generate surplus within constraints and how discursive mechanisms contain or render that surplus invisible. His work examines the intersection of governing power and what it cannot govern, analyzing archives of these encounters to uncover preserved surplus. His current projects develop these questions through Black radical thought, the history of luxury as a political discourse, and reconstructive democratic theory. Mathiowetz has authored the book 'Appeals to Interest: Language, Contestation, and the Shaping of Political Agency' and edited a volume on Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, contributing extensively to the fields of political theory and philosophy. He teaches courses on democratic theory, African-American political thought, political economy, queer theory, and ancient Greek philosophy, and has been recognized with the UCSC Excellence in Teaching Award in 2006, 2016, and 2025.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Social Science
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Aesthetics
• Law
• Psychoanalysis
• Geology
• Social psychology
• Media studies
• Epistemology
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Book Review: <i>Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity</i> , by Todd McGowan Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity, by McGowanTodd. Columbia University Press, 2024, 270 pp.

  Political Theory · 2025-08-03

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• "The Presence of Yourself to Yourself": A Politics?

  Theory & Event · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Political Science

  "The Presence of Yourself to Yourself":A Politics? Dean Mathiowetz Jonardon Ganeri. Inwardness: An Outsider's Guide. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. 144 pp. $19.95 (pb). ISBN: 9780231192293. "Going inward" is in the zeitgeist. A growing range of conditions today lead people far and wide to the isolation or angst that invites or demands a more sustained sense of inwardness: the sense, as Jonardon Ganeri puts it in Inwardness: An Outsider's Guide, of "the presence of yourself to yourself." The isolating conditions of the pandemic and systemic injustice, the narrowness of relating through social media, the challenge of holding to what one knows to be valid against the forces of widespread deception are all, in various ways, instances that require turning to one's inward sense of self and one's experience. Meanwhile, ever more present cultures of mindful awareness, ranging from the popular trends of McMindfulness to ancient meditative traditions, invite practitioners [End Page 495] to cultivate inwardness as a path toward resilience, compassion, community, or enlightenment. In the face of these pressures, imperatives, and invitations, this every day "presence of yourself to yourself" becomes not more familiar but more intense as a condition of both anguish and solace. But what is this "presence of yourself to yourself"? Ganeri explores this question in a compact book of a dozen short chapters. To investigate, not to answer: if the inquiry is as enigmatic to the casual questioner, Ganeri demonstrates that it is essentially a question, one that can be thematized and adumbrated but not settled because inwardness is an experience without a stable referent. The self that senses the presence is the self that is sensed; inwardness is a process that undoes categories of subject and object. This makes inwardness a worthy and compelling philosophical topic, one that Ganeri unfolds in insightful and often effective ways through brief encounters with literary and philosophical sources. His explorations also verge, in intriguing ways, on themes of power and politics. However, Ganeri does not take up those connections, resulting in a one-sided conception of subjectivity. For the political theorist, to be a subject connotes both and at once being a perspectival, agentic, empowered self—a "subject of" experience—and a self who is "subject to" the power and agency of others and structures. Thus, this otherwise engaging and gratifying text is less a resource for political theory than a discourse marked by its near absence—and an invitation to bring political thinking into the compelling and vital terrain Ganeri has mapped in this book. Inwardness thematizes inwardness without, as I have already intimated, forming an overarching argument about it. Indeed the book ends by posing the question of whether inwardness ought to be "expanded" through further inquiry and practice or instead "revoked" as a pernicious fiction, a question whose individual and philosophical stakes the preceding discourse artfully lays out. Ganeri begins with a conceptualization of inwardness that is offhandedly familiar as the cultural legacy of the Global North (invoking Avicenna and Augustine, with a nod to their common root in Plotinus), as disembodied consciousness that moves within the interior "space" of mind as a storehouse of memory. He swiftly finds this conception wanting, noting how attending to a sensation or a memory transforms it. Thus the self who is "stored" in the hall of memory is also actively re-making these memories; a creative subject quickly scrambles Augustine's conception of inwardness and its intuitive appeal. Most intriguing to me at this early juncture of Ganeri's exploration is the appearance of the sensing body and its sensorium as informing our critical examination of inwardness. Ganeri performs a similar decentering operation upon early Buddhist conceptualizations of conscious awareness as a lantern that is both self-illuminating and illuminating the inward self, a concept that he finds convincingly rejected by first-century Buddhist scholar Nāgārjuna. Raising critical doubt about foundational images of inwardness from west and east opens the terrain Ganeri then explores. Reading Atugawa Ryūnosuke's "In a Grove" alongside its film adaptation as Rashōmon, he explores that one's inwardness is known by attending not to "what's inside" a person but to how...

  PublisherDOI

• Grazie

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2020

  • Geology

  I owe much of what is included in these pages to the encounters and conversations with scholars and artists operating at the intersections of theory, culture, politics, and aesthetics.In this regard I extend my first note of gratitude to Marco Orlandi, whose restoration of the Liberty Edicola (newsstand) in Casalmaggiore, Italy, as well as his reflections on the ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions of cultural preservation proved invaluable to my own considerations.Not to be overlooked are the people of Casalmaggiore themselves and, most notably, mayor Luciano Toscani, Carlo Gardani, and the gracious sta√ of the Biblioteca Civica A. E. Mortara-especially Sandra Furini and Vittorio Rizzi-for their research expertise and their permission to reproduce some of the archival material in these pages.I would also like to thank Luigi Briselli for his technical know-how in providing reproductions of archival photographs.Last but not least, I thank the friends at the Fuori Porta (Cappella, CR) who cultivate a unique space of convivium and restoration.As always, my

  DOI

• Kairos and Affect in Rancière's "Ten Theses on Politics"

  eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2017-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Kairos and Affect in Ranciere’s “Ten Theses on Politics” A commentary on “Ten Theses on Politics” by Jacques Ranciere, Theory & Event, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2001) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32639 Dean Mathiowetz University of California, Santa Cruz Volume 20, No. 1 Winter, 2017 Author note: This document, prepared for Open Access, is identical in text to the final version submitted to the journal on December 20, 2016, to be published by the journal in Volume 20, No. 1. The journal is on-line and thus the article should be cited by paragraph numbers, included here in brackets. [1] The event of Ranciere’s essay “Ten Theses on Politics” included not only its 2001 appearance in Theory & Event, but also a symposium on it pub- lished two years later. 1 Thus my comment here, on the occasion of Theory & Event’s 20 th Anniversary, marks only the most recent of several returns to Ranciere’s essay in the digital flows of this journal. The 2003 symposium offered compelling entry points for commenting again upon “Ten Theses,” now fifteen years after its publication. One might ask, as did two of the symposium’s interlocutors in the immediate shadow of the 9/11 attacks, what it means to read the “Ten Theses” in contexts rendered by major polit- ical shifts, like the more recent 11/9. 2 Or one might engage “Ten Theses” at the level of philosophical critique. 3 In this short reflection, I instead ap- Online Publication Forthcoming

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• The Berkeley School of Political Theory as Moment and as Tradition

  PS Political Science & Politics · 2017-06-12 · 1 citations

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  An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

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• An interview with Hanna Fenichel Pitkin

  2016-05-26

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Relativism: a lecture (1984)

  2016-05-26

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Hanna Fenichel Pitkin

  2016-05-26 · 5 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Hanna Fenichel Pitkin has made key contributions to the field of political philosophy, pushing forward and clarifying the ways that political theorists think about action as the exercise of political freedom. In so doing, she has offered insightful studies of the problems of modern politics that theorists are called to address, and has addressed them herself in a range of theoretical genres.. This collection of her works approaches each of these dimensions of Pitkin’s contributions in turn: The Modern Condition and the Impetus to Theorize: Pitkin has offered sustained reflection on what aspects of modern political life prompt the impulse to theorize politics. Highlighting the pitfalls that modern life and philosophy also present for that enterprise, she suggests an agenda for political theorizing that engages the dilemmas of modernity in ways that grasp the importance of paradox as a portal of insight into the modern condition, and eschews attempts at easy resolution. Moral Philosophy, Judgment, Justice: Pitkin has turned at several points in her career to the concept of justice as one that particularly brings together questions of agency and responsibility, the insights of moral philosophy, and judgment. Drawing upon a variety of methodological resources and theoretical inspirations, her work engages ordinary language philosophy, pedagogical practice, and textual study, to yield a complex and subtle set of observations, all of which open moral philosophy and matters of judgment to questions of action and responsibility in the exercise of political freedom. Action: Political agency and its obstacles are a key theme in Pitkin’s work and a main area of her theoretical innovation. She has examined the appeal of autonomy as a picture of political agency, explored the ways that the institutional arrangements of modern liberal societies attempt to link of individual and political agency and offered a picture of political freedom as maintaining the tension between individual "parts" and collective "wholes," Finally, Pitkin has meditated on the political and social conditions that most impede our ability to grasp agency as a practice of political freedom, and gestured to paths that may lead forward.

  PublisherDOI

• Obligation and consent (1965–1966)

  2016-05-26

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Representation and democracy: uneasy alliance (2004)

  2016-05-26 · 1 citations

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Frequent coauthors

• Stephen K. White

  29 shared

• Paul Gronke

  Reed College

  25 shared

• Morten Valbjørn

  Aarhus University

  25 shared

• Arndt Leininger

  Chemnitz University of Technology

  25 shared

• Jason Reifl

  Indiana University

  25 shared

• Erin A. Snider

  Texas A&M University

  25 shared

• Amber E. Boydstun

  University of California, Davis

  25 shared

• Kathleen Searles

  University of South Carolina

  25 shared

Awards & honors

• UCSC Excellence in Teaching Award: 2006
• UCSC Excellence in Teaching Award: 2016
• UCSC Excellence in Teaching Award: 2025