Samuel Weber is an American philosopher and one of the leading thinkers across the disciplines of literary theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. He is the Paul de Man Chair at The European Graduate School / EGS, as well as the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanities and the co-director of the Paris Program in Critical Theory at Northwestern University. Weber studied with Paul de Man and Theodor W. Adorno, whose book, Prisms, he co-translated into English. The translation of, and introduction to Theodor Adorno’s most important book of cultural criticism helped define the way in which the work of the Frankfurt School would be read and understood in the English-speaking world. Professor Weber has also published books on Balzac, Lacan, and Freud as well as on the relation of institutions and media to interpretation. In the 1980s he worked in Germany as a “dramaturge” in theater and opera productions. Out of the confrontation of that experience with his work in critical theory came the book, Theatricality as Medium, published in 2004 by Fordham University Press. In 2005 he published Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking, also at Fordham. His most recent book has been published in French under the title, Inquiétantes singularités (Disquieting Singularities). Translations of his writings into Chinese and Korean are currently in preparation. His current research projects include “Toward a Politics of Singularity” and “The Uncanny”.

Josh Cohen is Professor of Modern Literary Theory in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Professor Cohen’s key interests are in psychoanalysis (as both practising clinician and academic), literature and philosophy (especially Blanchot, Adorno and Benjamin), and American literature since the mid-nineteenth century (especially Melville, James, Stevens and contemporary fiction). He is on the advisory board of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, and is currently working on a book on the place of inertia and lassitude in the history of culture and ideas.