Simon Critchley is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Essex. He is the author of The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Blackwell, 1992) and Very Little…Almost Nothing (forthcoming from Routledge). He is the editor of, with Robert Bernasconi, Re-Reading Levinas (Routledge, forthcoming), with Peter Dews, Deconstructive Subjectivities (SUNY, 1995), and with Robert Bernasconi and Adriaan Peperzak, Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings (Indiana, 1996).
Paul Davies teaches philosophy at the University of Sussex, having previously taught at Loyola University of Chicago and De Paul University of Chicago. He is the author of several articles on Levinas, Blanchot and related topics and of Experience and Distance (SUNY, forthcoming). He is currently working on material for a book on philosophy and the idea of a literary project.
Christopher Fynsk is Professor of Comparative Literature and Philosophy, and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the author of Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Cornell, 1994) and of Language and Relation (Stanford, 1996).
Rodolphe Gasché is Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His books include The Tain of the Mirror (1986) and Inventions of Difference: On Derrida (1994). He is currently finishing a book-length study on the work of Paul de Man entitled Wild Cards.
Leslie Hill, Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Warwick, is the author of Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Cambridge University Press, 1990), Marguerite Duras: Apocalpytic Desires (Routledge, 1993), and a forthcoming book entitled Maurice Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary.
Michael Holland teaches French literature at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He is one of the founders of Paragraph, a journal of modern critical theory, and currently one of its editors. He is the editor of The Blanchot Reader (Blackwell, 1995) and is now working on a fulllength study of the work of Maurice Blanchot.
Roger Laporte was born in Lyons in 1925 and for many years taught philosophy in Montpellier. His major works were published as Une Vie (POL, 1986); most of his critical writings are collected in Quinze variations sur un theme biographique (Flammarion, 1975) and Etudes (POL, 1990). He was awarded the Prix France-Culture in 1978, and was in charge of seminars at the College de Philosophie from 1989 to 1991.
Ian Maclachlan is Lecturer in French at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of Roger Laporte: The Orphic Tezt (Berg, forthcoming), and is currently working on a study of writing and time in recent French fiction and philosophy.
Jeffrey Mehlman is Professor of French Literature at Boston University and the author of A Structural Study of Autobiography, Revolution and Repetition, Cataract: A Study of Diderot, and Legacies: Of Anti-Semitism in France; and, most recently, Geneologies of the Text: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Michael Newman is Head of Theoretical Studies and Art History at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and has held a Research Fellowship in Philosophy at the University of Louvain (Belgium) to complete a study of memory and forgetting in Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida and Blanchot. He is the author of many articles on art and philosophy.
Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier is Professor in the Département de littérature française of the University of Paris VIII. She has published several books on the theory of writing, notably Le Texte divisé (Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), Ecraniques (Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1990) and L’ldée d’image (Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1995). Her research is situated at the frontier between literature, aesthetics and the cinema, examining the possible cross-overs between the notion of filmic writing and the work of the text in literary modernity.
Gillian Rose, who died last year, was Professor of Social and Political Thought in the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick. She is the author of Dialectic of Nihilism: Post- Structuralism and Law, Hegel contra Sociology, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, The Broken Middle, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays; and, most recently, Love’s Work (Chatto & Windus, 1995) and Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Ann Smock teaches French Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the translator of L’Espace Littéraire and L’Ecriture du désastre (both University of Nebraska Press) and the author of numerous articles on Blanchot and other contemporary French writers. She is currently preparing a book-length study of texts by Blanchot, des Forêts, Melville and Beckett.