‘I Speak Like a Ten-Year Old with Strange Jargon Attached to it’. An Interview with Jodi Dean

Abstract

Jodi Dean (1962) has been teaching political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, from 1994 onwards, from 2007 as full professor. She got her BA degree in history at Princeton University in 1984, and both her MA (1987) and PhD (1992) degrees in philosophy from Columbia University. In graduate school, she became interested in Soviet studies and questions of ideology, and moved into political theory. Studying Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and particularly Lukács, brought her to the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Her Ph.D. thesis, supervised by Jean Cohen, was published in a reworked version as The Solidarity of Strangers (University of California press, 1996). Her next book Aliens in America (Cornell university press, 1998), received broad media attention. Next to (co-)editing a number of books on political theory, she further published Publicity’s secret: how technoculture capitalizes on democracy (Cornell 2002), and Žižek’s politics (Routledge 2006). She serves as (co-)editor of the journal Theory & Event and maintains a nice weblog (jdeanicite.typepad.com). This interview was conducted on February 18, 2009, when Jodi Dean was in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, as the Verhagen visiting professor at the faculty of philosophy of Erasmus University Rotterdam.