Bruno Bosteels

Bruno Bosteels is Dean of Humanities and Jesse and George Siegel Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, with a joint appointment in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Prior to returning to Columbia in 2016, he taught for many years at Harvard and Cornell 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, forthcoming in Japanese with Koshisha), 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), El pensamiento de Oscar del Barco: De Marx a Heidegger (Ariel Pennisi), La comuna mexicana (Akal-Mexico, 2021; second edition Akal-Spain, 2022; forthcoming in English as The Mexican Commune with Duke University Press); and ¿Qué es la antifilosofía? (Prometeo Libros, 2024). Between 2005 and 2011 he 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titled Philosophies of Defeat: The Jargon of Finitude (Verso); and the second, a collection of recent and previously unpublished essays under the title The State and Insurrection: New Interventions in Latin American Marxist Theory (University of Pittsburgh Press). 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 from French to English 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), Can Politics Be Thought? (Duke), and Badiou by Badiou (Stanford). He recently translated the Argentine philosopher León Rozitchner’s Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism (Brill) and is finishing the translation of Alain Badiou’s Nietzsche (Columbia University Press).