Stathis Gourgouri
Biographic Data
| ID | 166038 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stathis Gourgouri |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stathis |
| FAMILY NAME | Gourgouri |
| SIGNATURE | GOURGOURI S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2374-7273 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Off-Screen Vision: The Legacy of Teshome Gabriel
This essay is a meditation on the notion of Third Cinema and a tribute to the person who singularly theorized it: Teshome H. Gabriel, a professor of film at UCLA, who was a veritable late-Bandung figure as an Ethiopian exile since his radical student days. Gabriel's teaching was formative for a number of students from the postcolonial sphere who came though California universities in the 1980s, and his historical presence traces a unique account …
Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition
Against the backdrop of ever-increasing nationalist violence during the last decade of the twentieth century, this book challenges standard analyses of nation formation by elaborating on the nation's dream-like hold over the modern social imagination. Stathis Gourgouris argues that the national fantasy lies at the core of the Enlightenment imaginary, embodying its central paradox: the intertwining of anthropological universality with the primacy …
Preface to a Collective Pedagogical Document
The preface is a description of the project as a collective pedagogical experience. Cavafy's orientations are reconsidered as responses to the contradictions of colonial life in the Southeastern Mediterranean world and his poetics as a rubric for disrupting interpretive orthodoxies all around
Thinking with Balibar: A Lexicon of Conceptual Practice
Lessons in Secular Criticism
Secular criticism is a term invented by Edward Said to denote not a theory but a practice that counters the tendency of much modern thinking to reach for a transcendentalist comfort zone, the very space philosophy wrested away from religion in the name of modernity. Using this notion as a compass, this book reconfigures recent secularism debates on an entirely different basis, by showing (1) how the secular imagination is closely linked to societ…
Three Phrases of History
This essay takes as point of departure three phrases by Marx, Heidegger, and Benjamin in order to restage Aristotle’s notion of zōon politikon as a way of rethinking humanism as a radical political project for our times. At the same time, it reconfigures ontological questions of human-being through a consideration of human animality beyond the traditional divide between nature and culture
Xenia - Debt at home, debt is always foreign
The concerns of this article are twofold: first, it examines the nature of debt as a social and economic force that fosters conditions of alienation in persons and institutions. Debt is also considered ontologically to be pertinent to the institution of the family as well as general conditions of kinship, of what determines what is ancestral and what is foreign. Second, it examines the conditions of financial and cultural crisis in Greece in rece…
Preliminary Thoughts on Left Governmentality
In the manufactured politics of crisis that we see increasingly in many societies around the world, the question of what politics can overcome the impasse of so-called democratic rule, which serves as a cover for the domination of liberal oligarchies, has become urgent. Mining the most radical elements in Foucault's thinking about governmentality, this essay seeks to imagine a politics of left governmentality that would evade the pitfalls of left…
Cavafy's Debt
Cavafy's Debt” is an examination of poetic indebtedness in a context that defies calculation. What do societies owe to their poets? What does it mean for societies to lay claim to poets? What do poets owe to their language? What does it mean for poetry to exist beyond its language? Why is Greek indebted to Cavafy? What does Cavafy owe to James Merrill
Political Theology as Monarchical Thought: Political Theology as Monarchical Thought: Stathis Gourgouris
Dream-Work of Dispossession: The Instance of Elia Suleiman
Essentially a cinema of occupation and dispossession, Palestinian cinema disrupts standard notions of national cinema, complicating conventional expectations of national aesthetics or national dreams. As the borders of Palestine's historical territory are continuously under erasure, so too are the symbolic boundaries of its language, which is flexible and inventive; the language of Palestinian cinema is a limit-language. No one has expressed this…
Lessons in Secular Criticism
This book reconfigures recent secularism debates, by showing (1) how the secular imagination is closely linked to society's radical poiesis, its capacity to imagine and create unprecedented forms of worldly existence; and (2) how the space of the secular animates the desire for a radical democratic politics that overturns inherited modes of subjugation, whether religious or secularist. For Gourgouris, secular criticism is a form of political bein…
Part 1: Why I Am Not a Postsecularist
Postsecularist discourse, as it has been fashioned in recent years, cannot really handle the problem of atheism—especially an atheism predicated not on the nonexistence of God but on the irrelevance of God. Arguing for the latter takes atheism outside the epistemological orbit of belief. What enables the whole framework to stand together is a tragic view of the universe, which privileges the immanent sense of wonder over the transcendental sense …
Idolatry, Prohibition, Unrepresentability
This is a meditation on the assertion by Cornelius Castoriadis that “every religion is idolatry.” Idolatry here is configured beyond the conventional understanding of the idol as a concrete object of worship which works within the logic of representation. In monotheism, even the unrepresentable—or, perhaps, especially the unrepresentable—is an idol, an object of worship that is otherwise silenced by a language that claims to worship a nonobject. …
Every Religion Is Idolatry
After reviewing the contemporary politics of espousing political theology as a mode of thinking, this essay is a meditation on the assertion by Cornelius Castoriadis that "every religion is idolatry." Idolatry here is configured beyond the conventional understanding of the idol as a concrete object of worship which works within the logic of representation. In monotheism, even the unrepresentable—or, perhaps, especially the unrepresentable—is an i…
Derealizations of the Ideal: Walcott Encounters Seferis
Derek Walcott’s staged encounter with George Seferis, by explicit invocation, in his poem “From This Far” (1980) is a nearly unprecedented instance of postcolonial confrontation with Greek antiquity, not through the conventional avenues of colonial classicism but through the wayward paths of Greek modernity. It therefore presents a rare opportunity for a series of reconsiderations of the tension between the poetic and the political, whether the c…
Recoil from the Real? – Žižek out of Athens
Antisecularist Failures: A Counterresponse to Saba Mahmood
Research Article| September 01 2008 Antisecularist Failures: A Counterresponse to Saba Mahmood Stathis Gourgouris Stathis Gourgouris Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2008) 20 (3): 453–459. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2008-005 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite …
Detranscendentalizing the Secular
Against simple antisecularist claims that secularism is to be equated with Western rationalism or with Christianity, or with colonialism tout court, I argue that an essential task of secular criticism (according to Edward Said's initial conception) is to conduct a double and dialectical critique of the metaphysics of both secularism and antisecularism
Orientalism and the Open Horizon of Secular Criticism
The Lyric in Exile (Meditations on the Hollywooder Liederbuch )
Research Article| December 01 2004 The Lyric in Exile (Meditations on the Hollywooder Liederbuch) Stathis Gourgouris Stathis Gourgouris Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Qui Parle (2004) 14 (2): 145–175. https://doi.org/10.1215/quiparle.14.2.145 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Stathis Gourgouris; The Lyric in Exile (Meditations on the Hollywooder Liederbuch…
Transformation, Not Transcendence
Research Article| May 01 2004 Transformation, Not Transcendence Stathis Gourgouris Stathis Gourgouris Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2004) 31 (2): 55–79. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-31-2-55 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Stathis Gourgouris; Transformation, Not Transcendence. boundary 2 1 May 2004; 31 (2): 55–79. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-31-2-55 Dow…
The Stratigraphy of Dislocation - Jerusalem, Cairo, New York: An Interview with Edward Said
A Lucid Drunkenness (Genet's Poetics of Revolution)
Research Article| April 01 1998 A Lucid Drunkenness (Genet’s Poetics of Revolution) Stathis Gourgouris Stathis Gourgouris Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1998) 97 (2): 413–456. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-97-2-413 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Stathis Gourgouris; A Lucid Drunkenness (Genet’s Poetics of Revolution). South A…
Philosophy and Sublimation
Cornelius Castoriadis's theory of sublimation is not only innovative within the Freudian tradition, but opens up the domain of inquiry as to society's process of radical social institution. Sublimation is indeed socialization, not merely aesthetic cathexis. A specific sort of sublimation that may be said to mobilize the project of autonomy is linked to philosophy both because it is implicated in a process of interminable interrogation, and becaus…
Detranscendentalizing the Secular
Against simple antisecularist claims that secularism is to be equated with Western rationalism or with Christianity, or with colonialism tout court, I argue that an essential task of secular criticism (according to Edward Said's initial conception) is to conduct a double and dialectical critique of the metaphysics of both secularism and antisecularism
Political Theology as Monarchical Thought: Political Theology as Monarchical Thought: Stathis Gourgouris
Philosophy and Sublimation
Cornelius Castoriadis's theory of sublimation is not only innovative within the Freudian tradition, but opens up the domain of inquiry as to society's process of radical social institution. Sublimation is indeed socialization, not merely aesthetic cathexis. A specific sort of sublimation that may be said to mobilize the project of autonomy is linked to philosophy both because it is implicated in a process of interminable interrogation, and becaus…
Transformation, Not Transcendence
Research Article| May 01 2004 Transformation, Not Transcendence Stathis Gourgouris Stathis Gourgouris Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2004) 31 (2): 55–79. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-31-2-55 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Stathis Gourgouris; Transformation, Not Transcendence. boundary 2 1 May 2004; 31 (2): 55–79. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-31-2-55 Dow…
Antisecularist Failures: A Counterresponse to Saba Mahmood
Research Article| September 01 2008 Antisecularist Failures: A Counterresponse to Saba Mahmood Stathis Gourgouris Stathis Gourgouris Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2008) 20 (3): 453–459. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2008-005 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite …
Nationalism and Oneirocriticism: Of Modern Hellenes in Europe
Diaspora 2:1 1992 Nationalism and Oneirocriticism: Of Modern Hellenes in Europe Stathis Gourgouris Princeton University 1. Greece and the Prospect of European Kefiguration In November 1990, the Parisian newspaper Le Monde organized a symposium among a group of France's leading intellectuals with the title "The Greeks, the Romans, and Ourselves." The overall impetus of the symposium was an interrogation (with an inkling toward revision) of Greece'…
Derealizations of the Ideal: Walcott Encounters Seferis
Derek Walcott’s staged encounter with George Seferis, by explicit invocation, in his poem “From This Far” (1980) is a nearly unprecedented instance of postcolonial confrontation with Greek antiquity, not through the conventional avenues of colonial classicism but through the wayward paths of Greek modernity. It therefore presents a rare opportunity for a series of reconsiderations of the tension between the poetic and the political, whether the c…
Nationalism and Oneirocriticism: Of Modern Hellenes in Europe
Diaspora 2:1 1992 Nationalism and Oneirocriticism: Of Modern Hellenes in Europe Stathis Gourgouris Princeton University 1. Greece and the Prospect of European Kefiguration In November 1990, the Parisian newspaper Le Monde organized a symposium among a group of France's leading intellectuals with the title "The Greeks, the Romans, and Ourselves." The overall impetus of the symposium was an interrogation (with an inkling toward revision) of Greece'…
Research, Essay, Failure (Flaubert's Itinerary)
New Literary History - Volume 26, Number 2, Spring 1995
Philosophy and Sublimation
Cornelius Castoriadis's theory of sublimation is not only innovative within the Freudian tradition, but opens up the domain of inquiry as to society's process of radical social institution. Sublimation is indeed socialization, not merely aesthetic cathexis. A specific sort of sublimation that may be said to mobilize the project of autonomy is linked to philosophy both because it is implicated in a process of interminable interrogation, and becaus…
A Lucid Drunkenness (Genet's Poetics of Revolution)
Research Article| April 01 1998 A Lucid Drunkenness (Genet’s Poetics of Revolution) Stathis Gourgouris Stathis Gourgouris Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1998) 97 (2): 413–456. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-97-2-413 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Stathis Gourgouris; A Lucid Drunkenness (Genet’s Poetics of Revolution). South A…
The Stratigraphy of Dislocation - Jerusalem, Cairo, New York: An Interview with Edward Said
The Lyric in Exile (Meditations on the Hollywooder Liederbuch )
Research Article| December 01 2004 The Lyric in Exile (Meditations on the Hollywooder Liederbuch) Stathis Gourgouris Stathis Gourgouris Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Qui Parle (2004) 14 (2): 145–175. https://doi.org/10.1215/quiparle.14.2.145 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Stathis Gourgouris; The Lyric in Exile (Meditations on the Hollywooder Liederbuch…
Transformation, Not Transcendence
Research Article| May 01 2004 Transformation, Not Transcendence Stathis Gourgouris Stathis Gourgouris Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2004) 31 (2): 55–79. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-31-2-55 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Stathis Gourgouris; Transformation, Not Transcendence. boundary 2 1 May 2004; 31 (2): 55–79. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-31-2-55 Dow…
Orientalism and the Open Horizon of Secular Criticism
Antisecularist Failures: A Counterresponse to Saba Mahmood
Research Article| September 01 2008 Antisecularist Failures: A Counterresponse to Saba Mahmood Stathis Gourgouris Stathis Gourgouris Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2008) 20 (3): 453–459. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2008-005 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite …
Detranscendentalizing the Secular
Against simple antisecularist claims that secularism is to be equated with Western rationalism or with Christianity, or with colonialism tout court, I argue that an essential task of secular criticism (according to Edward Said's initial conception) is to conduct a double and dialectical critique of the metaphysics of both secularism and antisecularism
Recoil from the Real? – Žižek out of Athens
Derealizations of the Ideal: Walcott Encounters Seferis
Derek Walcott’s staged encounter with George Seferis, by explicit invocation, in his poem “From This Far” (1980) is a nearly unprecedented instance of postcolonial confrontation with Greek antiquity, not through the conventional avenues of colonial classicism but through the wayward paths of Greek modernity. It therefore presents a rare opportunity for a series of reconsiderations of the tension between the poetic and the political, whether the c…
Lessons in Secular Criticism
This book reconfigures recent secularism debates, by showing (1) how the secular imagination is closely linked to society's radical poiesis, its capacity to imagine and create unprecedented forms of worldly existence; and (2) how the space of the secular animates the desire for a radical democratic politics that overturns inherited modes of subjugation, whether religious or secularist. For Gourgouris, secular criticism is a form of political bein…
Part 1: Why I Am Not a Postsecularist
Postsecularist discourse, as it has been fashioned in recent years, cannot really handle the problem of atheism—especially an atheism predicated not on the nonexistence of God but on the irrelevance of God. Arguing for the latter takes atheism outside the epistemological orbit of belief. What enables the whole framework to stand together is a tragic view of the universe, which privileges the immanent sense of wonder over the transcendental sense …
Idolatry, Prohibition, Unrepresentability
This is a meditation on the assertion by Cornelius Castoriadis that “every religion is idolatry.” Idolatry here is configured beyond the conventional understanding of the idol as a concrete object of worship which works within the logic of representation. In monotheism, even the unrepresentable—or, perhaps, especially the unrepresentable—is an idol, an object of worship that is otherwise silenced by a language that claims to worship a nonobject. …
Every Religion Is Idolatry
After reviewing the contemporary politics of espousing political theology as a mode of thinking, this essay is a meditation on the assertion by Cornelius Castoriadis that "every religion is idolatry." Idolatry here is configured beyond the conventional understanding of the idol as a concrete object of worship which works within the logic of representation. In monotheism, even the unrepresentable—or, perhaps, especially the unrepresentable—is an i…
Dream-Work of Dispossession: The Instance of Elia Suleiman
Essentially a cinema of occupation and dispossession, Palestinian cinema disrupts standard notions of national cinema, complicating conventional expectations of national aesthetics or national dreams. As the borders of Palestine's historical territory are continuously under erasure, so too are the symbolic boundaries of its language, which is flexible and inventive; the language of Palestinian cinema is a limit-language. No one has expressed this…
Political Theology as Monarchical Thought: Political Theology as Monarchical Thought: Stathis Gourgouris
Cavafy's Debt
Cavafy's Debt” is an examination of poetic indebtedness in a context that defies calculation. What do societies owe to their poets? What does it mean for societies to lay claim to poets? What do poets owe to their language? What does it mean for poetry to exist beyond its language? Why is Greek indebted to Cavafy? What does Cavafy owe to James Merrill
Preliminary Thoughts on Left Governmentality
In the manufactured politics of crisis that we see increasingly in many societies around the world, the question of what politics can overcome the impasse of so-called democratic rule, which serves as a cover for the domination of liberal oligarchies, has become urgent. Mining the most radical elements in Foucault's thinking about governmentality, this essay seeks to imagine a politics of left governmentality that would evade the pitfalls of left…
Xenia - Debt at home, debt is always foreign
The concerns of this article are twofold: first, it examines the nature of debt as a social and economic force that fosters conditions of alienation in persons and institutions. Debt is also considered ontologically to be pertinent to the institution of the family as well as general conditions of kinship, of what determines what is ancestral and what is foreign. Second, it examines the conditions of financial and cultural crisis in Greece in rece…
Thinking with Balibar: A Lexicon of Conceptual Practice
Lessons in Secular Criticism
Secular criticism is a term invented by Edward Said to denote not a theory but a practice that counters the tendency of much modern thinking to reach for a transcendentalist comfort zone, the very space philosophy wrested away from religion in the name of modernity. Using this notion as a compass, this book reconfigures recent secularism debates on an entirely different basis, by showing (1) how the secular imagination is closely linked to societ…
Three Phrases of History
This essay takes as point of departure three phrases by Marx, Heidegger, and Benjamin in order to restage Aristotle’s notion of zōon politikon as a way of rethinking humanism as a radical political project for our times. At the same time, it reconfigures ontological questions of human-being through a consideration of human animality beyond the traditional divide between nature and culture
Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition
Against the backdrop of ever-increasing nationalist violence during the last decade of the twentieth century, this book challenges standard analyses of nation formation by elaborating on the nation's dream-like hold over the modern social imagination. Stathis Gourgouris argues that the national fantasy lies at the core of the Enlightenment imaginary, embodying its central paradox: the intertwining of anthropological universality with the primacy …
Law (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Political science (14 works) · Art (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · History (10 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Literature (7 works) · Theology (7 works)