Faculty

A. Kiarina Kordela

Kiarina Kordela received her Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1998, when she joined the Department of German Studies and Russian, at Macalester College, where she is also working closely with the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. Her interdisciplinary approach to German and cultural studies is based on her expertise in intellectual history, philosophy, critical theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, economic and political theory, theories of ideology, film analysis and visual theory, and literature and literary theory. One distinguishing aspect of both her research and teaching is her focus on the relation between economic structures and metaphysics in secular capitalist modernity.

Taught courses include: "The Subject of the Film,” "Modernity and the Unconscious: What Does God Do When He Is Dead?," “Modernity and the Unconscious: Reason, Desire, and Power,” "Cinema Studies: From Goebbels to Hollywood," "Modernism-Postmodernism," “Philosophy, Literature, Film,” “How to Re-Appropriate Dead White Men,” and “Before, During, and After Marx” (Fall 2005).

Her publications include:

• "$urplus (Spinoza, Lacan)," a volume in the SUNY series Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature. (ed. Charles Shepherdson, SUNY Press, 2007) see http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61404
• "Capital: At Least It Kills Time (Spinoza, Marx, Lacan, and Temporality)," Rethinking Marxism 18:4 (October 2006): 539-563
• “Marx, Condensed and Displaced” (in The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century Down the Royal Road, ed. Catherine Liu, John Mowitt, Thomas Pepper, and Jackie Spice, The University of Minnesota Press, Mpls, MN, June 2007)
• "Marx's Update of Cultural Theory," special issue of Cultural Critique on "Cultures of Finance," Vol. 65 (Winter 2007): 44-66, “Grammar of Secsual and Visceral Reason” (Parallax)
• “It Looks Down Upon Us: Allegorical Fields and Repetitive Errors” (Modern Language Studies, special issue on Goethe)
• “The Democratic Father: Credit and Crime in Metaphor” (in Literary Paternity—Literary Friendship, U of NC Press)
• “Political Metaphysics: God in Global Capitalism” (Political Theory).   

Forthcoming publications include:

• "The Gaze of Biocinema," in European Film Teory (ed. Temenuga Trifonova), Routledge
• "Spinoza: A Thought Beyond Dualisms, Creationist and Evolutionist Alike," in Spinoza Now ed. Dimitris Vardoulakis), Stanford University Press
• “Myths of Cultural Studies,” special issue of Cultural Critique on "Cultural Studies"

Office: 208 Humanities
Phone: 651-696-6524
email: kordela@macalester.edu

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