Thomas Claviez (Edited By) Thomas Claviez is Professor for Literary Theory at the University of Bern, where he is responsible for the MA program in World Literature. He is the author of
Grenz fälle: Mythos- Ideologie- American Studies (1998) and
Aesthetics and Ethics: Otherness and Moral Imagination from Aristotle to Levinas and from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to House Made of Dawn (2008) and the coauthor, with Dietmar Wetzel, of
Zur Aktualität von Jacques Rancière (2016). He has published widely on issues of community, recognition, literary theory, and moral philosophy. He is the editor of The
Conditions of Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics on the Threshold of the Possible (2013) and of
The Common Growl: Towards a Poetics of Precarious Community (2016) and the coeditor of
Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature (2006) and of
Critique of Authenticity (2019). He is currently working on a monograph with the title
A Metonymic Community? Towards a New Poetics of Contingency.
Viola Marchi (Edited By) Viola Marchi is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern. She studied English and Italian literatures at the University of Pisa and the University of Bern, receiving her PhD in English from the latter in 2019, with a dissertation titled “Fuori Luogo: Community and the Impropriety of the Common.” In 2016, with support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, she was a visiting fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. She has published the articles “Ethics, Interrupted: Community and Impersonality in Levinas” (2015) and “The Alienation of the Common: A Look into the ‘Authentic’ Origin of Community” (2019). She is currently working on her first monograph.
Alain Badiou (Foreword By) Alain Badiou is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the École Normal Supérieure in Paris and still holds seminars at the Collège International de Philosophie and at the European Graduate School. A philosopher, political activist, and playwright, he has published some of the most original, influential, and by now classic works of contemporary philosophy:
Theory of the Subject (1982),
Manifesto for Philosophy (1989),
Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (1993), Deleuze:
The Clamor of Being (1997), and the three installments of his most ambitious work:
Being and Event (1988),
Logics of the Worlds: Being and Event 2 (2006), and
The Immanence of Truths: Being and Event 3, released in French in 2018.
Alain Badiou is former chair of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and, with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard, founder of the faculty of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII.
Étienne Balibar is Professor Emeritus of Moral and Political Philosophy at the Université de Paris X Nanterre; Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine; and Anniversary Chair in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. His research in the fields of political, moral, and Marxist philosophy focuses on emancipation, citizenship, and on what he terms “equaliberty.” The breadth of his thought can be gauged from his published works, from
Reading Capital, released in 1965 and coauthored with his mentor Louis Althusser, to the more recent
We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (2003),
Equaliberty (2014),
Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy (2015),
Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology (2017), and
Secularism and Cosmopolitanism (2018).
Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor and Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. She is the founder of the interuniversity SOCRATES network NOISE and of the Thematic Network for Women’s Studies ATHENA, which she directed until 2005. Her research combines social and political theory, cultural politics, feminist theory, and ethnicity studies. She is the author of
Patterns of Dissonance: A Study on Women in Contemporary Philosophy (1991),
Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (1994),
Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002), and
Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (2006). Her latest publications,
The Posthuman (2013) and
Posthuman Knowledge (2019), call for a new type of critical knowledge, one able to address and challenge the intersections of power and violence, privilege and discrimination, arising out of human interactions.
Drucilla Cornell was Professor Emerita of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University; Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Pretoria, South Africa; and a visiting professor at Birkbeck College, University of London. With a background in philosophy, law, and grassroots mobilization, she played a central role in the organization of the memorable conferences on deconstruction and justice at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 1989, 1990, and 1993. She was the author of
The Philosophy of the Limit (1992),
Feminism and Pornography (2000), and
Law and Revolution in South Africa: uBuntu, Dignity, and the Struggle for Constitutional Transformation (2014). She has also coedited several books:
Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender (1987), with Seyla Benhabib; and
Hegel and Legal Theory (1991) and
Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (1992), with David Gray Carlson and Michel Rosenfeld. She was part of a philosophical exchange with Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, and Nancy Fraser entitled
Feminist Contentions (1995). In addition to her academic work, she wrote four produced plays.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor Emeritus in Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French and Italian at Stanford University. As a public intellectual and highly prolific writer, he contributes to fields as diverse as the histories of national literatures in Romance languages, Western philosophical traditions, and forms of aesthetic experience in twenty first-century everyday culture. He has published more than two thousand texts, translated into more than twenty languages. His latest books are
Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature (2012),
Explosionen der Aufklärung: Diderot, Goya, Lichtenberg, Mozart (2013),
After 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present (2013), and
Brüchige Gegenwart: Reflexionen und Reaktionen (2019).
Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. His research covers the fields of philosophy and comparative literature, with a particular focus on ancient Greek thought and contemporary French philosophy and with a strong interest in the thinkers Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, and Levinas. He has edited and co-translated into English a number of Jacques Derrida’s texts: The Work of Mourning (2011), Learning to Live Finally (2007), Rogues (2005), and Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas (1999). His most recent publications are The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques
Derrida’s Final Seminar (2015), Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (2012), and Plato and the Invention of Life (2018).
Cary Wolfe is the Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University and the director of 3CT: Center for Critical and Cultural Theory. While he is most prominently known for his work in animal studies and posthumanism, his research and teaching covers fields such as systems theory, pragmatism, biopolitics, and American literature and culture. He is the founding editor of the University of Minnesota Press series Posthumanities, to which he contributed the monograph
What Is Posthumanism? (2010). He is the author of
Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (2003) and
Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (2012). His latest projects are: the monograph
Ecological Poetics, or, Wallace Stevens’ Birds and a special issue of
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities on “Ontogenesis beyond Complexity,” on the work of the multidisciplinary Ontogenetics Process Group, of which he is a member.
Slavoj Žižek is Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School, senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, and founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana. Since
The Sublime Object of Ideology in 1989, his first book in English, Žižek has published over forty books, spanning from political theory to cultural studies and bringing together the influences of Hegelian idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist thought. Among his most recent publications are
The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto (2018),
Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Posthumanity (2018), and
Sex and the Failed Absolute (2019).
