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 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 is one of the most important living philosophers of our time as well as a novelist and playwright. Professor emeritus of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he is also the author of numerous political essays and regularly intervenes on topics of great international urgency.Bruno Bosteels teaches in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. The author of numerous books, including Badiou and Politics and The Actuality of Communism, he is also the English translator of half a dozen of Badiou's texts.
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 in Literature Emeritus at Stanford University. His many books include Production of Presence (Stanford, 2004), In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006), Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung (Stanford, 2012), After 1945 (Stanford, 2013), and Crowds (Stanford, 2021), and Prose of the World (Stanford, 2021).
Cary Wolfe is Dunleive Professor of English at Rice University. He is author of Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside” and What Is Posthumanism? and editor of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, all from Minnesota. He edits the Posthumanities series for Minnesota.
Slavoj Zizek, a senior researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana, is the author of Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchock) and In Defense of Lost Causes, among many books. Marek Wieczorek is assistant professor of modern art history at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the author of The Touch of Light: Laser Paintings by Carel Balth.
