Staff Profiles

Benjamin Noys (BSc, MA, DPhil) is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Chichester, and the author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (Pluto 2000), The Culture of Death (Berg 2005), The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (Edinburgh University Press 2010), and editor of Communization and its Discontents (Minor Compositions 2011). Malign Velocities: Speed & Capitalism is forthcoming with Zero Books in 2014.

I have published widely in contemporary theory, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, film, literature and cultural politics. I am on the editorial boards of:

• Film-Philosophy
• S: Journal of the Jan Van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique
• The Journal of Critical Globalization Studies
• Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies

I am also a corresponding editor of Historical Materialism. I direct the interdisciplinary Theory Research Group at the University of Chichester (http://theoryresearchgroup.blogspot.com/).

Research Interests

Currently I am researching a critical monograph on the politics of life in contemporary theory, provisionally titled AntiLife. My research is focused on the political and aesthetic forms of contemporary theory, critical cultural politics, and the analysis of film, literature and art.

Teaching Interests

I teach literary and critical theory, including introductory courses, postcolonial literature and theory, and psychoanalytic approaches to culture.

Supervisory Interests

I have successfully supervised at PhD level and I am interested in supervising work postgraduate work in the following areas: contemporary theory, particularly contemporary European thought (Agamben, Badiou, Negri, Zizek); Lacanian psychoanalysis; modern and contemporary avant-garde and modernist fiction; cultural politics; film; horror fiction; and the graphic novel.

Selected Research Publications

Authored books

Academic monographs

2010 The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010 Hb, 2012, Pb).
2005 The Culture of Death (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005).
2000 Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (London and Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press, 2000).

Edited Collections

2011 Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia / Minor Compositions, 2011). http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=299

Books

2014 Malign Velocities: Speed & Capitalism (Zero Books, 2014), forthcoming.

Academic Articles

2015 ‘Full Spectrum Offense: Savoy’s Neo-Weird’, Benjamin Noys & Timothy S. Murphy (eds.), ‘Old & New Weird’ special issue, Genre (2015) [Forthcoming]
2013 ‘Guy Debord’s Time-Image’, ‘Debord’s filmmaking’ special issue, ed. Jason Smith, Grey Room (2013): 94-107.
2012 ‘Forget Neoliberalism?: Baudrillard, Foucault, and the Fate of Critique’, ‘Baudrillard and Politics’, ed. Jon Baldwin, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 9.2 (2012): http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol-9_3/v9-3-noys.html
2012 (w / Vanessa Lemm, Miguel Vatter, and Gustavo Chirolla), ‘Power, Life and Subjectivation’ (‘Poder, Vida y Subjetivación’) debate, Revista de Estudios Sociales 43 (2012): 166–173.
2011 ‘‘Grey in Grey’: Change, Crisis, Critique’, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies 4 (February 2011): 45–60: http://www.criticalglobalisation.com/Issue4/45_60_GREY_IN_GREY_JCGS4.pdf
2009 ‘‘Monumental Construction’: Badiou and the Politics of Aesthetics’, Third Text 23.4 (2009): 383–392.
2008 ‘Through a glass darkly: Alain Badiou’s critique of anarchism’, Anarchist Studies 16.2 (October 2008): 107–120.
2008 ‘‘The End of the Monarchy of Sex’: Sexuality and Contemporary Nihilism’, Theory, Culture & Society 25.5 (September 2008): 104–122.
2007 ‘La libido réactionnaire?: the recent fiction of J. G. Ballard’, Journal of European Studies 37.4 (December 2007): 391–406.
2007 ‘Antiphusis: Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man’, Film-Philosophy 11.3 (November 2007): 38-51: http://www.film-philosophy.com/2007v11n3/noys.pdf
2007 ‘Destroy Cinema! / Destroy Capital!: Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1973)’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24.5 (October 2007): 395–402.
2005 ‘Shattering the subject: Georges Bataille and the limits of therapy’, European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling and Health 7.3 (September 2005): 125–136.
2005 ‘Tulse Luper Database: Peter Greenaway, the New Media Object and the Art of Exhaustion’, Image and Narrative 12 (August 2005): http://www.imageandnarrative.be/tulseluper/noys.htm
2004 ‘Gestural Cinema? Giorgio Agamben on Film’, Film-Philosophy 8.22 (2004): http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n22noys
2003 ‘Badiou’s Fidelities: Reading the Ethics’, Communication & Cognition, 36.1 & 2 (2003): 31–44.
2002 ‘Time of Death’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 7.2 (August 2002): 515–9.
2002 ‘Fascinating (British) Fascism: David Britton’s Lord Horror’, Rethinking History 6.3 (Winter 2002): 305–318.
1998 ‘Georges Bataille’s Base Materialism’, Cultural Values 2.4 (October 1998): 499–517.
1997 ‘Communicative Unreason: Bataille and Habermas’, Theory, Culture & Society 14.1 (February 1997): 59–75.
1995 ‘Into the “Jungle”’, Popular Music 14.3 (October 1995): 321–331.

Chapters in edited book collections

2014 ‘Film-of-Life: Agamben’s Profanation of the Image’, in Cinema and Agamben, ed. Henrik Gustafsson and Asbjørn Grønstad (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), pp.89–101.
2013 ‘The Violence of Representation and the Representation of Violence’, in Violence and the Limits of Representation, ed. Graham Mathews and Sam Goodman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp.12–27.
2011 ‘Attenuating Austria: The Construction of Bourgeois Space in The Seventh Continent’ in The Cinema of Michael Haneke, ed. Ben McCann & David Sorfa (London: Wallflower, 2011), pp.141–150.
2011 ‘Psychopathology as a Game: J G Ballard and Conceptual Crime’, in Crime Culture: Figuring Criminality in Fiction and Film, ed. Bran Nicol, Patricia Pulham, and Eugene McNulty (London and New York: Continuum, 2011), pp.36–50.
1998 ‘Transgressing Transgression: The Limits of Bataille’s Fiction’, in Les Lieux Interdits: Transgression and French Literature, ed. Larry Duffy and Adrian Tudor (Hull: Hull University Press, 1998), pp.307–323.

Edited issues of journals

2015 (with Timothy S. Murphy) ‘Old & New Weird’, Genre (2015) [Forthcoming]
2007 (with Hugo Frey) ‘The New Reactionaries: Cultural Controversy in Context Part II’, Journal of European Studies 37.4 (December 2007).
2007 ‘Encore: Lacan and Film’, Film-Philosophy 11.3 (November 2007): http://www.film-philosophy.com/archive/vol11-2007/index.html
2007 (with Hugo Frey) ‘The New Reactionaries: Cultural Controversy in Context Part I’, Journal of European Studies 37.3 (September 2007).
2002 (with Hugo Frey) ‘History in the Graphic Novel’ Rethinking History 6.3 (Winter 2002).

Public Research

Articles

2013 ‘Excess and Austerity: The Films of Kōji Wakamatsu’, One+One: Filmmakers Journal 11 (2013): 13-18: http://oneplusonejournal.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/FMJ_Issue-11_S...
2013 ‘The Main Currents of Communization: Interview with Benjamin Noys’, The North Star, June 28 2013: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=9042
2012 ‘Speed Machines’, Nyx 7 ‘Machines’ (2012): 10–18.
2012 ‘Occult Negations or, Changing the “Standard of Reality”: Notes on Jeremy Millar’, Incognitum Hactenus: A quarterly journal of art, horror, and philosophy 2 (2012): 31-38. http://incognitumhactenus.com/volume-2/
2011 ‘Spaghetti Communism?’, Mute: Culture and Politics After the Net 3.2 (2011-12): 62–73. http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/spaghetti-communism
2011 ‘The Book of Desire’, E.R.O.S. 0 (2011): 13–29.
2010 ‘Apocalypse, Tendency, Crisis’, Mute: Culture and Politics After the Net 2.15 (April 2010): 44–59. http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/apocalypse-tendency-crisis.
2008 ‘Horror temporis’, Collapse vol. IV ‘Concept Horror’, ed. Robin MacKay (May 2008): 277–284.

Chapters

2013 ‘Days of Phuture Past: Capitalism, Time, and Acceleration’, in To the Reader, ed. Benjamin Fallon (Publication, 2013), pp.20–25.
2013 ‘The Grammar of Neoliberalism’, in Dark Trajectories: Politics of the Outside, ed. Joshua Johnson (New York: [NAME] Publications, 2013).
2010 ‘‘Remain true to the earth!’: Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal’, in Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1, ed. Nicola Masciandaro (Lexington, KY: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1: 2010), pp. 105–128.
2005 ‘Fascinating (British) Fascism: Lord Horror to Meng & Ecker’ Afterword in D. Britton, Fuck Off and Die, illustrated by K. Guidio (Manchester: Savoy Books, 2005). [N. pag., 5787 words]