About

Bruno G. Bosteels is a professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, affiliated with the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. His academic focus includes Latin American and Iberian cultures, with an emphasis on comparative literature and society. As a core faculty member, he contributes to the intellectual community through research and teaching in these areas, engaging with topics related to Latin American studies and comparative cultural analysis.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Physics
• Epistemology
• Social psychology
• Archaeology
• Psychoanalysis
• History
• Philosophy
• Quantum mechanics

Selected publications

• Between Freud and a Naked Woman: Notes on Sabina Berman’s Dora

  EIAL - Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe · 2024-01-04

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In January of 2001, theater-goers in Mexico City were treated to a "scene" worthy of Charcot's notorious séances with hysterics at the Salpêtrière in Paris : on the stage, a young woman called "Dora" is lying naked on an operating table, flanked by two characters called Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé, both of them fully dressed. Mere seconds after the latter announces in an aside to the audience that the doctor has decided to perform a "major surgery" and is preparing his symbolical scalpel to "castrate" his patient: "Si la enfermedad de la mujer independiente es un falo imaginario, hay que cortar el falo." The scene, in which Freud struggles with a woman still boldly talking back at him even though she now finds herself exposed in the utmost vulnerability of her naked body, comes toward the end of Feliz nuevo siglo Doktor Freud, itself a dramatic rewriting of the famous case of Freud's Dora by the Mexican playwright, journalist, producer and psychologist by training, Sabina Berman. Directed by Sandra Félix with a superb stage design by Philippe Amand, the play at the time of its opening featured Ricardo Blume in the role of Sigmund Freud, Marina de Tavira as Dora (also Anna Freud as well as Gloria, described in the stage directions as a 1960s-type feminist, dressed in black and with short hair - I will come back later on to this combination of roles in a single actor, which is the exact opposite of the reduplication of actors for one character that happens in the case of Freud), Juan Carlos Beyer as Freud 2 (also Herr K. and Otto Rank), Enrique Singer as Freud 3 (also Herr F., a railway worker, and Carl Gustav Jung), and Lisa Owen as Lou Andreas Salomé (also Frau K., Martha Freud, Frau F., Dora as adult, and Ernest Jones).

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• Introduction

  Revista hispánica moderna/Revista hispanica moderna · 2023-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Introduction Bruno Bosteels and Graciela Montaldo Jean Franco lived for many years, until her death, in an apartment filled with books, posters, and objects of various kinds, with a direct view over 612 West 116th Street, home to Casa Hispánica. Having devoted all her life to studying the cultures of Latin America, her institutional ties to the field of Hispanic studies were never easy. This was because, when she arrived in the United States, the field was torn by tensions between Spanish Peninsular studies and the Latin American world; because it was very reluctant to make room for women scholars; and because it was rooted in philology, which resisted all tendencies to think of culture in political terms. Jean Franco fought on all these multiple fronts at once to disrupt and transform the institutional framing of Hispanism. To do so, just as she had learned by studying the practices of Latin American women, she made alliances with colleagues in other disciplinary areas. Through this strategy, she not only began to strengthen the field of Latin American studies, she also put them in dialogue with other cultures. We should remember that from its earliest beginnings in the American university system, Latin American culture was relegated to a minor role, as if it were unable to address and interact with other fields. Jean Franco was one of the first scholars who radically changed this situation. To have given intellectual and institutional legitimacy to the Latin American field is one of her most significant legacies. The texts in this dossier include testimonies from friends, students, and colleagues. Each one provides a piece of the puzzle that makes up Jean Franco's work. Each one tells a story of some of her many legacies. We gathered these testimonies to understand not only how her work redesigned the field of Latin American studies but also how Jean touched the lives of all those of us who knew her and learned from her intelligence, from her generosity, and, above [End Page 185] all, from her vitality. With Jean there was never any respite—no chance to settle into our comfort zones or relax into easygoing chitchat. She was always studying reality with a relentlessly inquisitive eye. Resisting institutional constraints in favor of critical thought, Jean reaches the pages of the Revista Hispánica Moderna to keep pushing us in our studies and make us question our own work. We like to think that if she were looking at her old department on the other side of the street today, she would recognize—and probably criticize—some of the profound methodological and political changes that she herself brought to the field of Latin American literature and culture. [End Page 186] Bruno Bosteels Columbia University Graciela Montaldo Columbia University Copyright © 2023 Hispanic Institute, Columbia University

  PublisherDOI

• Universality and Its Discontents

  Routledge eBooks · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Epistemology
  • Psychology

  In recent years, particularly among readers of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, there has been a strong push to reassert a programme of political universalism. Once looked upon with great suspicion for concealing particular interests, universalism seems to have regained its emancipatory edge. In “Universality and Its Discontents,” Bruno Bosteels questions this new universalism on the basis of two fundamental questions, the first, having to do with the relation between universality and singularity, and the second, concerning the relation between universalization and the history of capitalism – a relation for which the translation and subsumption of particulars under the law of value as real abstraction becomes a useful model for further elaboration. Revisiting the continuing relevance of the discussions between Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Žižek in the 2000 book Hegemony, Contingency, Universality, Bosteels addresses the unresolved contradictions of post-transcendental social theory and the dangers of what Étienne Balibar refers to a real universalization.

  PublisherDOI

• Psychanalyse du reste du monde

  La Découverte eBooks · 2023-08-24

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Borges in French Theory

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-09-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Starting in the early 1960s, Jorge Luis Borges quickly became a celebrity among French thinkers. Philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; historians such as Michel Foucault; semiologists such as Julia Kristeva; or sociologists such as Jean Baudrillard all had recourse at one point or another to ideas and formulations from the Argentine writer. In addition to the appeal of Borges’s unique style of writing and thinking, two lines of affinity brought about this unexpected confluence of interests: the shared critique of the subjectivity of “man,” or of the human at the center of the discourse of the human sciences, and the critique of language as “mimesis,” or as the imitation or representation of the real. However, what soon thereafter in the Anglophone world would come to be known as “French theory,” by giving entrance to Borges in some of its most significant early texts, may well have been welcoming into its midst the uncanny force of a Trojan horse. Indeed, the Argentine’s own theoretical and philosophical commitments always tended to favor a tradition that for the longest time was anathema to the whole Parisian philosophical scene, namely, the tradition of New England pragmatism. However, the point of contrasting the two is not to signal a supposed misreading so much as to see what we can learn from this about some of Borges’s most famous readers in France.

  PublisherDOI

• What Is To Be Undone: An Interview with Bruno Bosteels

  diacritics · 2022-01-01

  articleSenior author

  Bruno Bosteels speaks about the influence of Heidegger's thought on his monograph Philosophies of Defeat: The Jargon of Finitude and his work overall.

  PublisherDOI

• Marx’s Theory of the Subject

  SUNY Press eBooks · 2022-03-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Literature and Revolution in Transition

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-12-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This essay focuses on Nellie Campobello and Juan Rulfo to study how the Mexican Revolution by midcentury produced a singular aesthetic form in the guise of the unique short story or narrative sketch. This process involves a violent segmentation of the common, together with a no less forceful production of the singular. While Campobello and Rulfo tap into the resources of collective storytelling, they subject these oral materials to a process of aestheticization whose fundamental values lay in an image of self-standing beauty, or singularity, rather than community. Literature, even when its topic is the aftermath of the revolution, thus seems to run counter to the latter's ideals of collectivization. The chain of oral storytellers is typically interrupted with the appropriation of orality on behalf of an individual author with a unique signature. Based on the examples of Campobello and Rulfo, we might even ask whether there ever was such a thing as a novel of the Mexican revolution to begin with: not only because their sketches and short stories hardly can be considered novels but also because theirs amounts to a narrative of the counter-revolution.

  PublisherDOI

• Marx’s Theory of the Subject

  State University of New York Press eBooks · 2022-03-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Marx con Morgan

  Antrópica revista de ciencias sociales y humanidades. · 2022-07-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  La lectura de Lewis H. Morgan por parte de Karl Marx no sólo produce un cambio paradigmático desde una visión progresista lineal de la historia hacia un perspectivismo multilineal en el que hay lugar para el desarrollo desigual, los saltos y los retornos del pasado “arcaico” en el futuro próximo del comunismo. También le permite a Marx plantear, con base en la historia profunda del antiguo México, la posibilidad del levantamiento revolucionario de la comunidad en tanto comuna, tal y como de hecho ocurriría en Morelos. Marx en su etapa final se estaba acercando a una nueva comprensión del vínculo entre la comunidad como forma de reproducción de la vida colectiva y la comuna como forma política expansiva que no se puede limitar exclusivamente a su versión más conocida, asociada con la Comuna de París de 1871. En México, esta comprensión sitúa a Marx anticipadamente en la compañía de famosos historiadores de la Revolución mexicana como Jesús Sotelo Inclán o Adolfo Gilly, quienes –ya en pleno siglo veinte, pero sin conocerse o referirse explícitamente el uno al otro– aportarán otros tantos capítulos a la historia de esa otra comuna, la mexica o mexicana, sobre cuyas pistas el etnólogo estadounidense en nuestra opinión ya había puesto a Marx.

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Frequent coauthors

• Alain Badiou

  Institut za filozofiju

  12 shared

• ?

  6 shared

• Kathryn Wichelns

  4 shared

• Thomas Brockelman

  4 shared

• Франк Руда

  Capital Normal University

  4 shared

• Thomas F. Johnston

  4 shared

• Ed Pluth

  City University of New York

  4 shared

• Jeremi Roth

  New School

  4 shared

Labs

• ICLSPI