Description: In wide-ranging essays that are at once poetic and polemical, 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 or moral, theological or secular.
Brief description: Stathis Gourgouris (PhD, Comparative Literature, UCLA) is Professor of Comparative Literature and English, cross-listed with Classics, and the former director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, 1996), Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, 2003), and Lessons in Secular Criticism (Fordham 2013) and the editor of Freud and Fundamentalism (Fordham, 2010); he is also an award-winning poet with four volumes of poetry and a collection of essays published in Greek. He writes regularly in internet media (such as The Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Al Jazeera, Open Democracy, and The Immanent Frame) on political and literary matters.
Review Quotes: This collection of perfectly rewritten and ordered essays marks an important step in Stathis Gourgouris' bold deconstruction of every form of sacralization in our political discourses and practices. Following on the pathbreaking theories of Castoriadis and Clastres, but also drawing inspiration from Freud, and polemicizing with Zizek, Badiou, and other contemporary masters, it is in the 'monotheistic' confusion of unity and community that he sees the permanent origin of an injection of transcendence, therefore death, into our projects of emancipation. If ever a radical form of secular criticism was possible, this is it.--Étienne Balibar, author of Secularism and Cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypotheses on Religion and Politics