Anne O'Byrne

Associate Professor
Ph.D. Vanderbilt University, 1999

Harriman Hall 252
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY 11794-3750

Tel: (631) 632-7590
anne.obyrne@stonybrook.edu

Democracies abhor genocide and yet they perpetrate their own genocidal violence and then fail to acknowledge it. Drawing on the history of biological taxonomies, anthropological studies of kinship, and radical democratic theory, this work studies the root of the problem in the paradoxes of democratic inheritance and revolution, asking: What will it take to envision an anti-genocidal democracy?

“The Genocide Paradox is perceptive and powerfully suggestive. Bringing together democratic politics, time, and genocide, it illuminates troubling historical events with philosophical insights about the human condition, specifically the struggle to reconcile ourselves to a world of becoming when dependence on the past and uncertainty about the future are experienced as existential threats. A humane, thoughtful, creative work.”—Jennifer Culbert, Johns Hopkins University

“O’Byrne’s scholarship is meticulous, and her vast and transdisciplinary engagement with this difficult topic is nothing less than astounding.”—Peg Birmingham, DePaul University

When Jean-Luc Nancy first encountered the work of Jacques Derrida in the 1960s, he knew he was hearing something new, a voice genuinely of its time. Thinking with and against each other over the course of their long friendship, the two thinkers reshaped the European intellectual landscape. Nancy’s writings on Derrida, collected in this volume, reflect on the elements of their shared concerns with politics, the arts, religion, the fate of deconstruction, and the future of sense. Rather than studies, commentaries, or interpretations of Derrida’s thought, they are responses to his presence—not exactly a presence to self, but a presence in the world.

Research: From Natality and Finitude to my current project on democracy, generational life, and genocide, this work has happened at the intersection of ontology and politics. Articles and chapters investigate the political and ontological questions that arise around embodiment ("The Politics of Intrusion," “Umbilicus”), gender ("The Excess of Justice"), labor ("Symbol, Exchange and Birth"), teaching ("Pedagogy without a Project"), and worldiness (“Amery, Arendt and the Future of the World”). Much of it has dealt with the work of Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Translations, alone and with collaborators, include three books of Nancy’s: Being Singular Plural (with Robert Richardson, Stanford, 2000), Being Nude (with Carlie Anglemire, Fordham, 2014) and Corpus II (Fordham, 2013). Subjects and Simulations (Lexington, 2014), on the work of Jean Baudrillard and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, was edited with Hugh Silverman and Logics of Genocide: The Structures of Violence and the Contemporary World, was edited with Martin Shuster.

Irish Studies is an on-going interest. “Traumatized Sovereignty” deals with the functioning of sovereignty in Northern Ireland, and “Learning a Strange Native Language” is about inheriting the Irish language, with a nod to Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other.

You can find links to some of this work below.

Teaching: Social and political philosophy; democratic theory; contemporary political philosophy; philosophy and race; philosophy and genocide; Sensus communis; critical phenomenology; Arendt; Nancy; Nietzsche; Descartes; philosophy, commemoration and mourning; art and society.

Books

	Logics of Genocide, edited by Anne O'Byrne and Martin Shuster (Routledge, 2020)
	Natality and Finitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
	Subjects and Simulations, edited by Anne O'Byrne and Hugh Silverman (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2013).
	Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus II: Writings on Sexuality translated by Anne O'Byrne (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
	Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Nude translated by Anne O'Byrne and Carlie Anglemire (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
	Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural translated by Robert Richardson and Anne O'Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).