Foreword: Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou is former chair of the Ăcole Normale SupĂŠrieure 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.
Contributions: Ătienne Balibar
Ătienne Balibar is Professor Emeritus of Moral and Political Philosophy at the UniversitĂŠ 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 âequaliberty.â 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: Rosi Braidotti
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 Womenâs 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.
Contributions: Thomas Claviez
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 Tomâs 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.
Contributions: Drucilla Cornell
Drucilla Cornell was Professor Emerita of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and Womenâs 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.
Contributions: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert GuÊrard 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 Brßchige Gegenwart: Reflexionen und Reaktionen (2019).
Contributions: Viola Marchi
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 âFuori Luogo: Community and the Impropriety of the Common.â 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 âEthics, Interrupted: Community and Impersonality in Levinasâ (2015) and âThe Alienation of the Common: A Look into the âAuthenticâ Origin of Communityâ (2019). She is currently working on her first monograph.
Contributions: Michael Naas
Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. He is the author of Class Acts: Derrida on the Public Stage (2022), Apocalyptic Ruin and Everyday Wonder in Don DeLilloâs America (2022), Don DeLillo, American Original: Drugs, Weapons, Erotica, and Other Literary Contraband (2020), Plato and the Invention of Life (2018), The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derridaâs Final Seminar (2015), Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (2012), Derrida From Now On (2008), Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction (2003), and Turning: From Persuasion to Philosophy (1994). He is co-translator of a number of books by Jacques Derrida, including Life Death (2020), and is a member of the Derrida Seminars Editorial Team.
Contributions: Cary Wolfe
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 Stevensâ Birds and a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities on âOntogenesis beyond Complexity,â on the work of the multidisciplinary Ontogenetics Process Group, of which he is a member.
Contributions: Slavoj ŽiŞek
Slavoj ŽiŞek 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, ŽiŞek 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).
