Gavin Walker (on leave)

Gavin Walker is a cultural critic and theorist of global thought, comparative literature, politics and aesthetics at McGill University, where he is Associate Professor of History and Graduate Program Director of East Asian Studies. He is the author of The Sublime Perversion of Capital (Duke, 2016) and Marx et la politique du dehors (Lux Éditeur, 2022), the editor of The End of Area (Duke, 2019, with Naoki Sakai), The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68 (Verso, 2020), Foucault’s Late Politics, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, no. 121-4 (Duke, 2022), and most recently, ‘Ronsô’ no buntai: Nihon shihonshugi to tôchi sôchi (The Style of the Debate: Japanese Capitalism and its Governing Apparatuses) (Ohara Institute for Social Research, Hôsei University Press, 2023, with Yutaka Nagahara). His new book, The Rarity of Politics: Passages from Structure to Subject, is forthcoming from Verso.

A member of the editorial board of the Historical Materialism Book Series (Brill/Haymarket) and the editorial collective of positions: asia critique (Duke), he is also the editor and translator of Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility (Verso, 2020). His scholarship and teaching in the interdisciplinary critical humanities spans philosophy, literature, history, politics, and aesthetics in order to examine global debates on nationalism, capitalism, the postcolonial, psychoanalysis, and the status of difference after the critique of essentialism, alongside theories of translation, ideology, and subjectivity. His most recent scholarship deals particularly with questions of globality, historical time and peripheral modernity; Japanese and French thought of ’68 and after (especially Althusser, Badiou, Foucault, Lacan, and their students); the contemporaneity of the national question; the status of ‘area studies’, the theoretical humanities, and comparative literature after globalization; and the global intellectual history of Marxist theory. For more detail see Gavin Walker's profile on the website of the Department of History & Classical Studies.