Dr. Grobmeier has been teaching for the Philosophy Department and Regis College since 2014. His research interests include the History of Philosophy, 20th century and contemporary European political thought, German and French phenomenology, post-Holocaust philosophy and theology, and the critical intersection between the Earth Systems Sciences and the Environmental Humanities.
Currently, Dr. Grobmeier is working on a book-length study on the question of community and the problem of political authority as it figures in several 20th century and contemporary European philosophers and political theorists: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Luc Nancy. The book situates these thinkers against the historical backdrop of the social and political circumstances under which they were living and writing (the rise of fascism and authoritarianism, the crises of liberalism and liberal democracy, the aftermath of the Second World War, and the collapse of Soviet communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s) in order to argue that any conception of authority fashioned according to the political-theological ideal of “sovereignty” is inherently hostile to “community.” This antagonism between sovereignty and community is especially clear when we understand the latter to name a basic fact of human coexistence –– namely, the fact of our having to share the world with a plurality of countless others, prior to any mutual sense of belonging, voluntaristic effort of free association, or sovereign ambition to speak and act in the name of a “People.” The broader aim of the study, therefore, is to make the case for a political pluralism capable of responding to both (1) the moral indifference and cynicism characteristic of liberal or neo-liberal society in times of crisis, and (2) the persistent threat of democracy’s descent into authoritarian nihilism, ever the unwelcome shadow of any self-styled democratic State claiming to be at once “plural” and “sovereign.”
