The Perils of the One (Stathis Gourgouris)

Celebrating Recent Work by Stathis Gourgouris

In The Perils of the One, Stathis Gourgouris offers a philosophical anthropology that confronts the legacy of “monarchical thinking”: the desire to subjugate oneself to unitary principles and structures, whether political, moral, theological, or secular. In wide-ranging essays that are at once poetic and polemical, intellectual and passionate, Gourgouris reads across politics and theology, literary and art criticism, psychoanalysis and feminism in a critique of both political theology and the metaphysics of secularism.

About the Speakers:

Hent de Vries is Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities at NYU. He is Professor of  German, Religious Studies, Comparative Literature, and Affiliated Professor of Philosophy.

Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, works mainly in the areas of nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, literary and cultural theory, and postcolonial studies.

Lydia H. Liu is the Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University; Director, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her research centers on modern China, cross-cultural exchange, and global transformation in modern history, with a focus on the movement of words, theories, and artifacts across national boundaries and on the evolution of writing, textuality, and media technology.

Etienne Balibar, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, teaches at Columbia every Fall semester. He is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Université de Paris X – Nanterre and Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine.