Please join us in Kaplan 193 or online on Monday, December 8 at 5pm PST to hear about Visiting Researcher Jessica Marian’s book project, “Form, Style, ‘Critique’: The Review in Postwar France.”
Abstract:
Several now-iconic works in the tradition of postwar French theory began as book reviews: Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Giles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, and Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman, to name only a few. Review writing is usually considered a minor form of intellectual activity. In fact, it was a ubiquitous and vibrant practice in the postwar French intellectual scene, one of the primary forms of philosophical commentary and experimentation. Focusing on the journal Critique, I combine intellectual history, book history, and close reading to show how an apparently negligible form, the book review, animated some of the great works of the period.
Speaker bio:
Jessica Marian is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. She is currently contributing to the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Journals in Theory: Practices of Academic Judgement alongside Justin Clemens, Claire Colebrook, Joe Hughes, and Tom Ford. Her interdisciplinary research investigates how institutions and infrastructures shape modern and contemporary knowledge production. She mainly specialises in literary theory, twentieth-century French philosophy, periodical studies, and intellectual history. From September-December 2025, she is a Visiting Researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Angelaki (forthcoming 2026), New Literary History (2024), Australian Humanities Review (2024), and Australian Literary Studies (2023). She is currently developing two monographs. The first is a sole-authored book on the journal Critique, the genre of the review essay, and the problem of style in post-war French thought. The second is a co-authored project titled What is an Expert?, in development with the Journals in Theory group for Nebraska University Press. She is co-convenor of the Critical Research Association Melbourne (CRAM) and co-editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy.