Bruno Bosteels

Bruno Bosteels is professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. He returned to Columbia in 2016, after having taught for thirteen years at Cornell University, for three years at Columbia, and for six years at Harvard University. His research covers a wide range of topics in literature, culture, and politics in modern Latin America as well as contemporary philosophy and political theory. He is the author of Badiou o el recomienzo del materialismo dialéctico (Palinodia), Alain Badiou: une trajectoire polémique (La Fabrique, translated into German as Alain Badiou: Werdegang eines Streitbaren with Laika), Badiou and Politics (Duke, translated into Spanish as Badiou y lo político with Prometeo Libros), The Actuality of Communism (Verso, translated into German with Laika as Die Aktualität des Kommunismus, into Korean with a new preface by Galmuri as 공산주의의 현실성 : 현실성의 존재론과 실행의 정치, into Serbian with Univerzitet Singidunum as Aktuelnost Komunizma, and into Spanish with Prometeo Libros as La actualidad del comunismo), Marx and Freud in Latin America (Verso, Spanish translation as Marx y Freud en América Latina with Akal), El marxismo en América Latina: Nuevos caminos al comunismo (Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia) and El pensamiento de Oscar del Barco: De Marx a Heidegger (Ariel Pennisi). Between 2005 and 2011 he also served as general editor of Diacritics: Review of Contemporary Thought. He is currently preparing two new books, the first a sustained polemical engagement with contemporary post-Heideggerian thought, titled Philosophies of Defeat: The Jargon of Finitude (Verso) and the other, its utopian counterpart, The Mexican Commune (Duke). A collection of recent and previously unpublished essays is forthcoming under the title The State and Insurrection: New Interventions in Latin American Marxist Theory (Pittsburgh). With Joshua Clover he co-edits the book series "Studies in Literature and Revolution" for Palgrave Macmillan; and with George Ciccariello-Maher the book series "Radical Américas" for Duke University Press. He is also the translator and/or editor of over half a dozen books by Alain Badiou, among them Theory of the Subject (Continuum/Bloomsbury), Philosophy for Militants (Verso), Rhapsody for the Theatre (Verso), Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy (Verso), The Age of the Poets and Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose (Verso), The Adventures of French Philosophy (Verso), and Can Politics Be Thought? (Duke). Currently he is finishing the translation of León Rozitchner's Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism (Brill) and Alain Badiou's Nietzsche (Columbia University Press).

“Marxism and Subalternity.” Urgencias del latinoamericanismo en tiempos de globalización conflictiva: Tributo a John Beverley. Ed. Elizabeth Monasterios Pérez. Raleigh: Editorial A Contracorriente, 2020. 283-292.

"Rancières Mallarmé." Trans. Erik Vogt. Jacques Ranciere und die Literatur. Ed. Erik Vogt and Michael Manfé. Vienna - Berlin: Turia + Kant, 2020. 176-200.

“La comuna americana.” Horacio González, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Michael Löwy, Daniel Alvaro, Bruno Bosteels, Santiago M. Roggerone, Gisela Catanzaro, and Agustín Lucas Prestifilippo. Lecciones de la comuna. Vicente López: Mariano Ariel Pennisi, 2019. 63-74.

 “What Are Philosophers For in the Age of the Poets: Badiou with and against Heidegger.” Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives. Ed. Ranjan Ghosh. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 248-270.

“Three Paradoxes of Communist Art.” The Idea of the Avant-Garde and What it Means Today, vol. 2, ed. Marc James Léger. Bristol: Intellect, 2019. 423-427.

"Political Theory," The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx. Ed. Jeff Diamanti, Andrew Pendakis, Imre Szeman. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

"Lo que queda de Marx hoy: una teoría del sujeto." Slavoj Žižek, et al. Disparen contra Marx. Ed. Santiago Roggerone and Ariel Pennisi. Vicente López: Mariano Ariel Pennisi, 2018. 87-98.

"From Ayotzinapa to Tlatelolco: A Memorial of Grievances against the State." Nel segno del "sessantotto." Ed. Sandro Mezzadra and Mauricio Ricciardi. Special issue of Scienza & Politica: Per una storia dell doctrine 30.59 (2018): 41-60.

"La situación es catastrófica pero no es seria: Ironía, violencia y militancia en América Latina." Ironía y violencia en la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea. Ed. Brigitte Adriaensen and Carlos Van Tongeren. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2018. 41-57.

"Critique of Originary Violence: Freud, Heidegger, Derrida." The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 4 (2018): 27-66.

"Sobre la teoría de la disolución del Estado: Una política de la finitud." Perspectivas sobre marxismos latinoamericanos. Special issue of Escrituras americanas 2.2 (2018): 147-171. Reprinted in Del monólogo europeo al diálogo inter-filosófico. Ensayos sobre Enrique Dussel y la filosofía de la liberación. Ed. José Gandarilla and Mabel Moraña. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades, 2018. 387-403.

"Reading Rulfo with Benjamin and Derrida: End of Story." Mexican Literature in Theory. Ed. Ignacio Sánchez-Prado. London: Bloomsbury, 2018 (paperback edition 2019). 111-138.