Tracy McNulty, Associate Professor

Tracy McNulty, Associate Professor of French Literature, received her B.A. in French and English from U.C. Berkeley and her PhD in Comparative Literature from U.C. Irvine. Her research interests include 20th century French literature and comparative modernism, contemporary philosophy and critical thought, and psychoanalytic theory. In addition to these fields, she enjoys teaching interdisciplinary seminars on such questions as the origins of language, myth and symbolic thought, eroticism and perversion, and philosophical, scientific, and psychological theories of subjectivity and human agency. She has published essays on Jacques Lacan, Pierre Klossowski, Alain Badiou, Saint Paul, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Hebrew Bible. Her first book, The Hostess, My Neighbor: Hospitality and the Expropriation of Identity, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press. She is now writing a new book on the father, the symbolic, and group psychology (focused primarily on the Bible and on the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan), and is also interested in exploring the intersection of aesthetic philosophy and psychoanalysis in the works of Kant, Lacan, Lyotard and Rancière.

Selected Publications:

The Hostess, my Neighbor: Hospitality and the Expropriation of Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

“Hospitality after the Death of God,” forthcoming in a special issue of diacritics devoted to the work of Pierre Klossowski.

“Wrestling with the Angel” [on Emmanuel Lévinas and Saint Paul], in a special issue of Umbr(a) , “On Religion,” Fall 2005.

“Feminine Love and the Pauline Universal” [on Alain Badiou] in Alain Badiou: Philosophy and its Conditions , ed. Gabriel Riera. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005).

“Signed, Dionysus: Nietzsche’s Lost Letter to Freud,” in (a): a journal of culture and the unconscious, Volume II, no. 1, Fall 2002, 7-24.

“Solving the Sexual Impasse: Female Orgasm, Viagra, and the ‘Natural Law’ of Jouissance,” in Savoir, Volume 5, no. 1, September 2000, 75-100.

“Klossowski, ce soir,” in (a): a journal of culture and the unconscious, Volume I, no. 1, Spring 2000, 81-103.

“Israel as Host(ess): Hospitality in the Bible and Beyond,” in Jouvert: A Journal of Post-Colonial Studies, Volume 3, issues 1 and 2, 1999.

“The Other Jouissance, a Gay Sçavoir” [on Jacques Lacan], in Qui Parle, Volume 9, No. 2, Spring/Summer 1996, 126-159.

Research Interests:

Contemporary French thought
Psychoanalytic theory
The legacy of Nietzsche in French philosophy
Ethics and aesthetics
20th century French literature
Literature and perversion
Biblical hermeneutics and Bible as literature

Recent Courses:

Femininity, Ethics and Aesthetics
Libertine Literature
In Search of the Origins of Language
French Philosophy
20th Century Novel
Marguerite Duras
Political Theology
Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Biblical Diasporas in French Thought
Fictions of the Self
Literature after the Death of God: In and around the Collège de Sociologie
Topics in French Theory: Anthropology and Geneaology