Faculty

Steven Miller

Assistant Professor
Office: Clemens 415
Phone number: 645-2575 x1036
E-mail address: slm26@buffalo.edu

 

Interests:

19th and 20th Century European literatures; psychoanalytic theory; continental philosophy; translation studies.

Courses taught:

  • Graduate:
    • Fantasy and the Construction of Psychoanalytic Knowledge,
    • Psychosis, Semiology, Rhetoric
    • Translations
    • The Invention of Psychoanalysis
    • The Critical and the Clinical
    • Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Truth
  • Undergraduate:
    • 20th Century Experimental Theater
    • Critical Theory (Derrida)
    • Irony, Philosophy, and Literature
    • Psychology and Literature (Freud)

Work in progress:

Contestation: Politics, Psychoanalysis, and the Limits of Legal Theory. This book projects the event of political contestation into the field of literary studies in order to raise new questions about the relations among democracy, law, and religion; it proposes close readings of philosophical and literary texts by Bataille, Derrida, Genet, Lacan, and Saint Paul.

Hyperbolic Thinking. This book advances the thesis that hyperbole is a pivotal trope in modern political thought, psychoanalytic theory, and literature, from Descartes’ hyperbolic doubt to Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds”; the irony of Voltaire’s Candide; Clausewitz’s theory of absolute war; the death drive in Freudian psychoanalysis; the logic of hyper-Christianity in Flannery O’Connor and Georges Bataille; and, the rhetoric of the “worst” in Beckett’s late prose.

Selected publications:

  • "Literature and the Right to Marriage", ed. and intro., special issue of Diacritics, vol. 35., no. 4, Fall 2007.

  • “Open Letter to the Enemy: Jean Genet’s Holy War,” Diacritics, vol. 34, no. 2. Spring 2004.

  • “Hyperbolic Warfare: The Myth of Fury in Kant and Freud,” Umbr(a), Fall 2004, pp. 53-73.
  • “Lacan at the Limits of Legal Theory: Law, Desire, and Sovereign Violence,” Umbr(a), Spring 2003, pp. 81-94.

Curriculum Vitae  (pdf)