States of Exception: Sovereignty, Security, Secrecy

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Featured Speakers Spring 2009

Michael Hardt

Michael Hardt teaches in the Literature Program at Duke University.  He is author of Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minnesota, 1993) and four books co-written with Antonio Negri: Labor of Dionysus (Minnesota, 1994), Empire (Harvard, 2000), Multitude (Penguin, 2004), and Commonwealth (Harvard, forthcoming 2009).

Albrecht Koschorke

Albrecht Koschorke is a professor of German literature and literary studies at the University of Konstanz and a regular visiting professor at the University of Chicago. He received the Leibniz prize in 2003.  He is spokesman of the graduate program ‘Figures/Figurations of the Third’ and member of the Center of Excellence ‘Cultural Foundations of Integration’ at the University of Konstanz. His publications include: Geschichte des Horizonts (History of the Horizon), 1990; Körperströme und Schriftverkehr. Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Bodily Fluids and Writing Culture. Mediology of the 18th Century), ²2003; The Holy Family and Its Legacy, New York: Columbia UP 2003; Der fiktive Staat. Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas (The Fictitious State. Constructions of the Body Politic in European History), 2007 (co-author).

Jörn Münkner

Jörn Münkner is the coordinator of the bi-lateral, international Ph.D.-Net "Das Wissen der Literatur" at the German Department, Humboldt-University (Berlin). His interests include the artes belli in the Early Modern Period, culture and conflict, and codings of violence. Recent books include Eingreifen und Begreifen: Handhabungen und Visualisierungen in Flugblättern der Frühen Neuzeit (2008); with Christina Lechtermann and Haiko Wandhoff(eds.), Licht, Glanz, Blendung and Beiträge zu einer Kulturgeschichte des Leuchtenden (2008).

Andrew Norris

Andrew Norris, Associate Professor in the Political Science Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara is the editor of The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy (Stanford University Press, 2006) and Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Duke University Press, 2005).  He has published essays on Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Cavell, Kant, Hegel, Ernesto Laclau, Jean-Luc Nancy, Carl Schmitt, Thoreau, sovereignty, truth and politics, and the Bush-Cheney administration's use of 9/11 in Constellations, Diacritics, Law, Culture, & the Humanities, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Political Theory, Polity, Radical Philosophy, Telos, Theory and Event, the Social Science Encyclopedia, The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, and German and American edited collections.  He is currently completing a book entitled Publicity and Partiality: Political Reflection in the Work of Stanley Cavell.

Martin Puchner

Martin Puchner holds the H. Gordon Garbedian Chair in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University where he also directs the Theatre Ph.D. program. He is the author of Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Hopkins, 2002) and Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, 2006; winner of the MLA's James Russell Lowell Award). He has published essays in the London Review of Books, Raritan Review, N+1, Yale Journal of Criticism, The Drama Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, New Literary History, Theatre Research International, and Theatre Journal among others. His edited books and introductions include Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen (Barnes and Noble, 2003), Lionel Abel's Tragedy and Metatheatre (Holmes and Meier, 2003), The Communist Manifesto and Other Writings (Barnes and Noble, 2005), and Modern Drama: Critical Concepts (Routledge, 2007). He is the co-editor of Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage (Palgrave, 2006) and The Norton Anthology of Drama (forthcoming 2009) and the new general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, third edition (in preparation).

Elaine Scarry, a Professor of English, is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests include Theory of Representation, the Language of Physical Pain and Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art, Science and the Law.  She is the author of The Body in Pain, which is known as a definitive study of pain and inflicting pain. She argues that physical pain leads to destruction and the unmaking of the human world, whereas human creation at the opposite end of the spectrum leads to the making of the world. Her 1999 study, Dreaming by the Book won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. In the same year she published On Beauty and Being Just, which urges that universities, museums and architecture schools should return to an open concern with beauty.Elaine Scarry is a writer and lecturer on civic questions ranging from plane crashes to nuclear weapons to the Patriot Act. (Photograph: Bachrach)

Rei Terada

Rei Terada is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Critical Theory Emphasis at UC Irvine. She has published articles on critical theory in "Diacritics", "ELH", "SAQ", "Studies in Romanticism", "Postmodern Culture", "Textual Practice", and elsewhere. Her book, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the "Death of the Subject" (Harvard UP, 2001) won the René Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association for 2001-02. Her most recent book is Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Harvard UP, 2009).

Burkhardt Wolf

Burkhardt Wolf is an assistant professor at the German Department, Humboldt-University (Berlin). Recent books: Die Sorge des Souveräns. Eine Diskursgeschichte des Opfers (2004); with Anja K. Maier (eds.), Wege des Kybernetes. Schreibpraktiken und Steuerungsmodelle von Politik, Reise, Migration (2004); with Daniel Tyradellis (eds.), Die Szene der Gewalt. Bilder, Codes und Materialitäten (2007); with Karin  Harrasser and Thomas Macho (eds.), Folter. Politik und Technik des Schmerzes (2007);  with Elisabeth Wagner (eds.), Odysseen. Mosse-Lectures 2007 (2008).