of Victoria
Francophone StudiesNavigation
PhD (Queen's)
19th to 20th Century French and comparative literature, Romanticism, modernist poetics; post-Enlightenment and posthumanist philosophy; research-creation.
Emile Fromet de Rosnay teaches literature, film and culture.
He has published work on poet Stéphane Mallarmé (Mallarmésis, 2011), postcolonial fiction, Critical Digital Humanities, the theory of the useless, on the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and the linguist Emile Benveniste. He is currently re-examining the gap between the natural sciences and the human sciences, particularly in light of contemporary posthuman theories such as New Materialism, and seeks to understand how these emerge in the history of thought, culture and media. He directs the UVic interdisciplinary graduate program in Cultural, Social and Political Thought (CSPT). He has a forthcoming monograph at Punctum Books, Taunting the Useful, that develops a theory of the “virtual useless”.
Read Emile Fromet de Rosnay's expertise profile to find out more.
Posthumanism, New Materialism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Stéphane Mallarmé, Ananda Devi, Giorgio Agamben, Emile Benveniste, Phenomenology, History of Science and Consciousness, Critical Theory
“We Keep Being Modern” is a book project for rethinking posthumanism in response to theories such as Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT). It looks at how modern science has conflated the “common sensibles” with consciousness, and how this error keeps reproducing itself. Yet, while we “keep being modern,” it says “let’s be modern,” much in the way we say “le roi est mort. Vive le roi!”
“The Cinema of Lost Gestures” is a long-term project that examines gestures appearing and reappearing intertextually in postwar and contemporary cinema, particularly in the New Wave and in Contemporary filmmakers such as Christophe Honoré.
Books
Under the pen name Loumille Métros. Taunting the Useful. New York: Punctum Books (forthcoming)
Mallarmésis: Mythopoétique de Stéphane Mallarmé. New York: Peter Lang, 2011.
Articles
“Agamben's Posthuman Mediality: Ethics, History and Language” in Symposium. Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy (forthcoming).
“Benveniste inconnu ? Petite histoire d’une non-réception américaine” in Émile Benveniste 50 ans après les Problèmes de linguistique générale. Irène Fenoglio and Giuseppe d’Ottavi (eds.), Paris: Éditions rue d’Ulm. 2019.
“Taunting the Useful: Wondrous Gestural Potential (with Agamben)” in David Cecchetto (ed.). Phono-Fictions and Other Felt Thoughts. Victoria, Seattle: Noxious Sector Press, 2016: 37-68.
Book review of Revisioning Europe. The Films of John Berger and Alain Tanner (University of Calgary Press, 2011), published in University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 82, Number 3, Summer 2013.
“Mallarmé’s ‘Salut’ and the Tragic ‘Acte’”, in Joseph Acquisto (ed.), Thinking Poetry: Philosophical Approaches to Nineteenth-Century French Poetry. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013: 131–148.
“Science and Symptom from Mallarmé to the Digital Poet”, Text and Image Relations in Modern European Culture, Grigorian, Natasha, Thomas Baldwin and Margaret Rigaud-Drayton (eds.). West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2012.