Simon Critchley is has been professor in the
Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New
York City since 2004. He teaches as part-time professor at the
University of Essex, where he was appointed lecturer in 1989 and at the
Tilburg University in the Netherlands (since 2009). He held visiting
professorships at the universities of Nijmegen (1997), Sydney (2000),
Notre Dame (2002), New York’s Cardozo Law School (2005) and
the university of Oslo (2006). , part-time professor at the University
of Essex and visiting professor at the Univerity of Sydney and the
University of Notre Dame, USA. In 1997 and 2001 he held a Humboldt
Research Fellowship in philosophy at Frankfurt/Main (Germany).
Critchley is also “head philosopher” of the
International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde
network that surfaces through proclamations,
“denunciations” and live events
(http://www.necronauts.org/). Critchley is editor of the book series
Thinking the Political (Routledge), Blackwell Readings in Continental
Philosophy (Blackwell), Thinking in Action (Routledge) and How to
Read… (Granta, London, and W.W. Norton, New York). His
research focuses on modern Continental philosophy, the history of
philosophy, literature, ethics and politics. He has most recently
published on ethical and political theory, the relation between
philosophy and poetry and the nature of humor.
Selected Publications: Democracy and Disappointment:
On the Politics of Resistance. Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley in
Conversation (2008), On Heidegger’s ‘Being and
Time’ (with Reiner Schürmann, edited by Steven
Levine; 2008), The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008), Infinitely
Demanding. Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (2007), Things
Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (2005), Laclau,
A Critical Reader (edited with Oliver Marchart; 2004), On Humour
(2002), Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2001),
Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and
Contemporary French Thought (1999; reissued 2007), The Ethics of
Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (1999).
Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in
Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia
University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the director of the Sense
Lab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersections
between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing
body in movement. In her art practice she works between painting,
fabric and sculpture. Together with Brian Massumi she founded the
journal INFLeXions: A Journal of Research-Creation and co-organizes a
series of events and activities under the title Technologies of Lived
Abstraction dedicated to the collective exploration of new ways of
bringing philosophical and artistic practices into mutually beneficial
interaction. Her writing addresses the senses, philosophy and politics,
articulating the relation between experience, thought and politics in a
transdisciplinary framework moving between dance and new technology,
the political and micropolitics of sensation, performance art, and the
current convergence of cinema, animation and new media.
Selected Publications: Movement, Art, Philosophy
(2009), Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (2007),
Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada
(2003).
Oliver Marchart is professor in the Department of
Sociology at the University Lucerne and assistant professor
at in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. He
currently works on a project exploring
protest as a medium and the media of protest (“Protest als
Medium – Medien des Protests”). His research draws
on poststructualist philosophy, the Study of Culture and political
discourse analysis and generally focuses on political theory and
aesthetics. He studied under Ernesto Laclau at the University of Essex
and completed his second dissertation Politics and the Political. An
Inquiry into Post-Foundational Political Thought under the supervision
of Simon Critchley and Étienne Balibar. In 2005 he was
granted a fellowship at the Columbia University Institute for Scholars
at Reid Hall and at the École des Hautes Études
en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
Selected Publications:
Ästhetik des Öffentlichen. Eine politische Theorie
künstlerischer Praxis (forthcoming), Cultural Studies (2008),
Hegemonie im Kunstfeld. Die documenta-Ausstellungen dx, D11, d12 und
die Politik der Biennalisierung (2008), Post-Foundational Political
Thought. Political Difference in Nancy, Leford, Badiou, Laclau (2007),
Stand der Bewegung? Protest, Globalisierung, Demokratie –
eine Bestandsaufnahme (edited with Rupert Weinzierl; 2006), Neu
beginnen. Hannah Arendt, die Revolution und die Globalisierung (2005),
Laclau. A Critical Reader (edited with Simon Critchley; 2004), Das
Undarstellbare der Politik. Zur Hegemonietheorie Ernesto Laclaus (ed.;
1998).
Brian Massumi is professor in the Department of
Communication Sciences at the University of Montreal (Quebec, Canada)
and at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee (Switzerland). Massumi
is well-known for his translations of several major texts in French
poststructuralist theory, including Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and Jean-François
Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition. In addition to his
theoretical work and teaching, Massumi works with Erin Manning in her
research-creation laboratory Sense Lab. Together, they founded the
journal INFLeXions: A Journal of Research-Creation. With Manning he
co-organizes a series of events and activities under the title
Technologies of Lived Abstraction dedicated to the collective
exploration of new ways of bringing philosophical and artistic
practices into mutually beneficial interaction. Massumi received both
his Masters and Doctoral degrees in French Literature form Yale
University and completed postdoctoral work at Stanford University. His
research is two-fold: the experience of movement and the interrelations
between the senses, in particular in the context of new media art and
technology; and emergent modes of power associated with the
globalization of capitalism and the rise of preemptive politics.
Selected
Publications: Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect,
Sensation (2002), A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and
Guattari (ed.; 2002), The Politics of Everyday Fear (ed.; 1993), First
and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (with
Kenneth Dean ; 1993), A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia:
Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (1992).
Jacques Rancière, born in Algiers (1940), is Emeritus
Professor of Aesthetics and Politics at the University of Paris VIII,
where he taught from 1969 to 2000 in the Department of Philosophy, and
visiting professor in various American universities (Rutgers, Harvard,
Johns Hopkins, Berkeley, Chicago. His work crosses over the fields of
Social History, Politics, Aesthetics, Film Studies and Literature.
During the last years he focused more and more on Contemporary Art and
on the relations between Politics and Aesthetics. His work in progress
deals with the archaeology of the aesthetic regime of art.
Selected Publications (in English translation):
The Emancipated Spectator (2009), The Aesthetic Unconscious (2009),
Hatred of Democracy (2007), The Future of the Image (2007), The
Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2004),
Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (1998), On the Shores of Politics
(1995), The Names of History. On the Poetics of Knowledge (1994), The
Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation
(1991), The Nights of Labor. The Worker’s Dream in
Nineteenth-Century France (1989), Reading Capital (1968).