Contributions: Emily Apter
Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture and Comparative Literature, and Chair of French Literature, Thought, and Culture at New York University. Her books include Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018); Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013); Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (coedited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). Her current project, What Is Just Translation? takes up questions of translation and justice across media. Her essays have appeared in Public Culture, diacritics, October, PMLA, Comparative Literature, Art Journal, Third Text, Paragraph, boundary 2, Artforum, and Critical Inquiry. In 2019 she was the Daimler Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2017–18 she served as President of the American Comparative Literature Association. In fall 2014 she was a Humanities Council Fellow at Princeton University, and in 2003–4 she was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. She edits the Translation/Transnation book series at Princeton University Press.
Contributions: Étienne Balibar
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).
Contributions: J. M. Bernstein
J. M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His writings include The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (1992), Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (1995), Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (2002), and Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (2006). His most recent book is Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (2015). He is working on a manuscript with the tentative title Human Rights: On the Foundations of Ecological Socialism, from which the essay in this volume is drawn.
Contributions: Judith Butler
Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. Their books include Who's Afraid of Gender? (2024), What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022), The Force of Nonviolence (2020), Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (2004), and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).
Contributions: Monique David-Ménard
Monique David-Ménard is a psychoanalyst and philosopher. She has taught at the Université de Paris VII–Diderot and at universities throughout North and South America and Europe, and she maintains a private psychoanalysis practice. Her publications include L’hystérique entre Freud et Lacan: Corps et langage en psychanalyse (Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis) and Deleuze et la psychanalyse: L’altercation.
Contributions: Hanan Elsayed
Hanan Elsayed is Associate Professor of French and Arabic at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Her research interests include Islam and history in Francophone literature from the Arab world, twentieth-century French literature and thought, and the French colonial legacy. She is the author of L’histoire sacrée de l’Islam dans la fiction maghrébine.
Contributions: Didier Fassin
Didier Fassin is Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He holds an Annual Chair at the Collège de France. He is recently the author of Life: A Critical User’s Manual (Polity) and The Will to Punish (Oxford University Press).
Contributions: Stathis Gourgouris
Stathis Gourgouris is Professor of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He is author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece; Does Literature Think?: Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era; Lessons in Secular Criticism; and Ενδεχομένως αταξίες (Contingent Disorders). His most recent book is The Perils of the One.
Contributions: Bernard Harcourt
Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and Director d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author most recently of The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War against Its Own Citizens (Basic Books, 2018) and an editor of the work of Michel Foucault.
Contributions: Jacques Lezra
Jacques Lezra is Distinguished Professor in the Departments of English and Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. His most recent publications are República salvaje (2019), On the Nature of Marx’s Things (2018), Untranslating Machines: A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought (2017), and Contra todos los fueros de la Muerte (2016).
Contributions: Patrice Maniglier
Patrice Maniglier is Maître de Conférences in the Philosophy Department of Paris Nanterre University. He has written on Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou, and Latour. He is the author of La vie énigmatique des signes: Saussure et la naissance du structuralisme, Foucault va au cinéma, and La philosophie qui se fait.
Contributions: Warren Montag
Warren Montag is the Brown Family Professor of Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles. His most recent books include Althusser and His Contemporaries (Duke University Press, 2013) and The Other Adam Smith (Stanford University Press, 2014).
Contributions: Adi M. Ophir
Adi M. Ophir is a Visiting Professor at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University and Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University. Among his works are Goy: Israel’s Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile, co‑authored with Ishay Rosen-Zvi (Oxford University Press, 2018); Divine Violence: Two Essays on God and Disaster (The Van Leer Institute, 2013); The One-State Condition, co‑authored with Ariella Azoulay (Stanford University Press, 2012); and The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals (Zone, 2005).
Contributions: Bruce Robbins
Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. His most recent books are Atrocity: A Literary History (Stanford, 2025) and Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford, 2022).
Contributions: Ann Laura Stoler
Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research, Founding Director of its Institute for Critical Social Inquiry since 2014, and one of the founding editors of Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon. Her books include Race and the Education of Desire (1995), Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (2002), Along the Archival Grain (2009), and Duress (2016).
Contributions: Gary Wilder
Gary Wilder is a Professor of Anthropology, History, and French and Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke, 2015) and The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago, 2005). He is co-editor of The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (Fordham, 2018) and The Fernando Coronil Reader: The Struggle for Life Is the Matter (Duke, 2019).
