Nothing Sacred
by Stathis Gourgouris

Nothing Sacred makes a bold call for reconceptualizing the projects of humanism and democracy as creative sources of emancipatory meaning, from the immediate political sphere to the farthest reaches of planetary ways of living.

Restaging Aristotle’s classic notion of the “political animal” in broad historical and geographical frames, Stathis Gourgouris explores the autopoietic capacities of human-being in society, while developing new frameworks of anticolonial humanism and radical democracy as the only worthy adversaries of neoliberal capitalism.

This reconfigured anthropological horizon enables us to imagine new ways of living by learning to pursue a radical politics of autonomy and a planetary vision that upholds life-affirming coexistence and equal sharing against the fetishism of hierarchy and servitude, money and technologic, sovereignty and endless growth.

Written with daring, erudition, and anarchic contestation, this book seeks the political through a poetic perspective. Nothing Sacred rejects niche thinking in the academy and engages a vast domain of reflections on the problem of human-being in today’s dismal world.

About the Author

Stathis Gourgouris is a Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He is the author of several books on political philosophy, aesthetics, and poetics, and writes and teaches on a variety of subjects that address the convergence of the poetics and politics of modernity and democracy. He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford University Press, 1996); Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford University Press, 2003); Lessons in Secular Criticism (Fordham University Press, 2013); The Perils of the One (Columbia University Press, 2019); and editor of Freud and Fundamentalism (Fordham University Press, 2010), Thinking with Balibar (Fordham University Press, 2020), and The Cavafy Dossier (2021). In addition, he has also published numerous articles on Ancient Greek philosophy, political theory, modern poetics, film, contemporary music, and psychoanalysis.

About the Speakers

Emily Apter is the Julius Silver Professor of French Literature Thought and Culture and Comparative Literature at New York University. Her published works include The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature, Continental Drift: From National Characters to Subjects, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, and most recently, Unexceptional Politics. The later develops a vocabulary of terms drawn from a wide range of media (political fiction, art, film, and TV serials), highlighting the scams, imbroglios, information trafficking, brinkmanship, and parliamentary procedures that obstruct and block progressive politics. She is also the editor of the book series Translation/Transnation from Princeton University Press.

Bruno Bosteels is the Acting Dean of Humanities and Professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures with a joint appointment in 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 and Politics, Marx and Freud in Latin America, and The Actuality of Communism, and is also the translator of several books by Alain Badiou.

Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2017) and The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003). With Robert G. O’Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). His research and teaching focus on topics including African American literature, Francophone literature, theories of the African diaspora, translation studies, archive theory, black radical historiography, cultural politics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surrealism, experimental poetics, and jazz.

Andreas Kalyvas is an Associate Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research. Professor Kalyvas's work focuses on democratic theory and the history of political thought from ancient Greek and Roman to modern and contemporary continental political theory. His research interests are situated in the intersection of politics, history, and jurisprudence with a strong emphasis on the relationship between popular sovereignty and constituent power; disobedience, resistance, sedition, and revolutionary breaks; the norm and the exception; emergency rule and dictatorship; state theory and oligarchic power; citizenship, cosmopolitanism, and migration.

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