Bruno Bosteels


Bruno Bosteels has served as a professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. As of 2024, Bosteels was
Acting Dean of Humanities and Professor of the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. He served until 2010 as the General Editor of diacritics.
Bosteels is well known to the English-speaking world for his work on Latin American literature and culture and his translations of the work of Alain Badiou. One of Badiou’s key early philosophical texts, Theory of the Subject, appeared in 2009. This was Bosteels’s English translation of Théorie du sujet. Since then, Bosteels has translated at least seven more books by Badiou.
Bosteels has research interests spanning contemporary philosophy, literary criticism, political and critical theory. He was awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, recognized for his literary criticism.

Selected bibliography

Original works
  • Badiou o el recomienzo del materialismo dialéctico
  • Alain Badiou, une trajectoire polémique
  • The Actuality of Communism
  • Badiou and Politics
  • Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis, and Religion in Times of Terror
  • La Comuna mexicana
Translations of books
  • Alain Badiou. Theory of the Subject, :
  • Alain Badiou. Wittgenstein's Anti-Philosophy
Essays
  • "Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics." Alain Badiou and Cultural Revolution. Special issue of positions: east asia culture critique 13.3 : pp. 576–634
  • "Alain Badiou's Theory of the Subject: The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism." Lacan: His Silent Partners. Ed. Slavoj Žižek
  • "Hegel in America." Religion, Politics, and the Dialectic: Hegel and the Opening of the Infinite. Ed. Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, and Slavoj Žižek.
  • "Rancière's Leftism, or, Politics and Its Discontents." Jacques Rancière: Politics, History, Aesthetics. Ed. Phil Watts and Gabriel Rockhill..
  • "Badiou and Hegel." Badiou: Key Concepts. Ed. Justin Clemens and A. J. Barlett..
  • "The Leftist Hypothesis: Communism in the Age of Terror." The Idea of Communism. Ed. Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek..
Interviews
  • "Can Change Be Thought? A Dialogue with Alain Badiou." Alain Badiou: Philosophy And Its Conditions. Ed. Gabriel Riera - this Bosteels interview of Badiou has been reprinted in the appendix to Bosteels' book Badiou and Politics, published in 2011