Eric Cazdyn
Professor of Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies, Literature and Critical Theory
Affiliations: Cinema Studies and the Literature and Critical Theory Program
PhD
Bio & Research
I teach courses on critical and cultural theory, psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, the clinic), Marx and Marxism (Frankfurt School, Jameson, Karatani), Deleuze, film and video, architecture, modern literature, and modern Japan. I’ve written the following books: The Already Dead(Duke, 2012), After Globalization (with Imre Szeman, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), The Flash of Capital (Duke, 2002); and editor of Trespasses: Selected Writings of Masao Miyoshi (Duke, 2010) and Disastrous Consequences (SAQ, 2007). My newest book, Nothing: Three Inquiries into Buddhism and Critical Theory (with Marcus Boon and Timothy Morton), is an attempt to reclaim for our present moment three categories that are regularly laughed out of polite conversation: “Enlightenment”, “Cure” and “Revolution”. This book will be published in 2015 by The University of Chicago Press. If I had to locate a red thread that connects my work, I would say that it is an obsession with how impossibilities of all kind (political, aesthetic, personal) are engaged. Two years ago I received the Mellon Foundation’s New Directions Fellowship (2012-2015) for a project called “The Worldly Clinic,” of which a film practice is part. My films have been screened and performed in Japan, Canada, the US, Europe and most recently in the UK as part of a two-week residency at The Cube Microcinema (Bristol) with Eric Chenaux. For more information see http://www.ericcazdyn.net/
Research fields include: Critical and literary theory, aesthetics and politics, Japanese film and modern Japanese literature, globalization, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and medical culture.
CV
Recent Publications
Recent articles have been published in Modern Language Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Social Text, Japan Forum, Alphabet City, Prefix, and the Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies. He has recently edited a volume of South Atlantic Quarterly on the philosophical and political problem of Disaster. Cazdyn is currently finishing a book manuscript on illness, time and contemporary politics (The New Chronic: Culture, Politics, Medicine), co-writing a manuscript entitled Something’s Missing: Politics and Culture in the New Century (to be published by Blackwell Press), and editing Trespasses: Selected Writings of Masao Miyoshi (Duke University Press, 2010). His book, The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan, was published by Duke University Press in Fall, 2002.
