Geoffrey Beimington is Professor of French at the University of Sussex. He is the author of books on eighteenth-century French fiction, on Lyotard, Rousseau and, most recently, Jacques Derrida. He has written extensively on contemporary French thought and translated several works by Derrida and Lyotard.
Jean-Michel Besnier teaches Philosophy at the Université de Compiègne and is a member of the Centre de Recherches en Epistemologie Appliquée in Paris, as well as of the editorial boards of several French reviews. He has published a book on Georges Bataille, La politique del’impossible: L’intellectuel entre révolte et engagement, and his most recent books are Histoire de la philosophie moderne et contemporaineand L’humanisme déchiré, both published in 1993. Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons, who has taught in the United States, France and Canada, is currently Associate Professor of French at Brock University, Ontario. She published her English translation of Georges Bataille’s L’expérience intérieure (State University of New York Press) in 1988 and has recently finished editing and translating a series of articles on Bataille for the same press.
Briony Fer teaches Art History at University College London and is particularly interested in Surrealism and psychoanalysis. She has recently co-written Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between thewars and is currently writing a book on abstract art.
Denis Hollier is Professor of French Literature at Yale University. Some of his books have been translated into English: Against Architecture:The writings of Georges Bataille (MIT Press, 1989), The College ofSociology (1937–39) (University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and ThePolitics of Prose: Essay on Sartre (University of Minnesota Press, 1986). He is the general editor of New History of French Literature (Harvard University Press, 1989).
Marie-Christine Lala is maître de conferences at the Université de Paris III—Sorbonne Nouvelle, where her research is concerned with the sciences of language and of literature. She has participated in conferences on Georges Bataille in Amsterdam, Rome, Freiburg, London and Paris, and was in charge of seminars at the Collège International de Philosophie from 1986–8.
John Lechte is Lecturer in Sociology at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of a book on the writing of Australian history, articles on Rousseau and psychoanalysis, Joyce, Kafka, Foucault, Derrida and Kristeva, as well as on Bataille. His most recent publication is JuliaKristeva, published by Routledge in 1990.
Alphonso Lingis is Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Excesses, Libido: The French existentialtheories, Phenomenological Explanations, Deathbound Subjectivity,The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (University of Indiana Press, 1994) and the forthcoming Abuses, Foreign Bodies and Sensation.
Michele Richman teaches French Literature and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes on anthropology and French modernism as well as on Bataille, Leiris and Barthes. Her first book, Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the gift (1982), was the first fulllength study of Bataille in English. She is currently preparing a study of Durkheim and the Collège de sociologie within the framework of French notions of otherness since the sixteenth century.
Allan Stoekl is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Politics,Writing, Mutilation: The cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris andPonge (University of Minnesota Press, 1985) and Agonies of theIntellectual: Subjectivity, commitment, and the performative in the 20thcentury French tradition (University of Nebraska Press, 1992). He has also edited and translated a Bataille anthology, Visions of Excess:Selected.writings of Georges Bataille, 1927–39 (University of Minnesota Press, 1985) and a collection of essays, On Bataille (Yale FrenchStudies, 78, 1990). He is currently writing a series of essays on the relationship between posthistory and postmodernity, and translating Blanchot’s novel Le trèshaut.
Susan Rubin Suleiman is Professor of Romance and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University. She is the author of AuthoritarianFictions: The ideological novel as a literary genre (1983, reissued 1993), Subversive Intent: Gender, politics, and the avant-garde (Harvard, 1990) and Risking Who One Is: Encounters with contemporary artand literature (Harvard, 1994).
Sarah Wilson was educated at Oxford and at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, where she lectures in the 20th century field, specializing in French art after 1945. She is the author of substantial essays on Dufy, Leger, Picabia, Ernst and Fautrier, and a monograph Matisse (Ediciones Poligrafa/Rizzoli, 1992). Her Calls to Realism: Artand politics in France, 1935–1955 is forthcoming from Yale University Press.