Emile Fromet de Rosnay

Emile Fromet de Rosnay is an Associate Professor in the French and Francophone Studies section of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures.

Bio

 Emile Fromet de Rosnay teaches literature, film and culture.

He has published work on poet Stéphane Mallarmé (Mallarmésis, 2011), postcolonial fiction, Critical Digital Humanities, the theory of the useless, on the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and the linguist Emile Benveniste. His work has examined the gap between the natural sciences and the human sciences, particularly in light of contemporary posthuman theories such as New Materialism, and seeks to understand how these emerge in the history of thought, culture and media. He is working on anarchism and law, and has a forthcoming review article on contemporary anarchist theory in Law + Critique. He directed the UVic interdisciplinary graduate program in Cultural, Social and Political Thought (CSPT). He practices research-creation, and his monograph,Taunting the Useful (Punctum Books, 2024), that develops a theory of the “virtual useless,” and is availbale via Open Access here.

Courses

• FRAN 100 : Intensive French I
• FRAN 170: Intensive French III
• FRAN 180 : Intensive French III
• FRAN 275 : Writing in French I
• FRAN 310 : Literary Texts II
• FRAN 325 : Studies in the Cultures of the French-speaking World (in English)
• FRAN 325A : The Tour de France (in English)
• FRAN 335 : Cinema and the relationship of cinema with literature and culture in the French-speaking world
• FRAN 375 : Writing in French II
• FRAN 450 : Studies in French Literature and Culture after 1800
• FRAN 470: Studies in Cultures of the French-Speaking World
• FRAN 504: Studies in Culture and Society
• FRAN 506: Studies in French Literature and Culture
• FRAN 580 : Special Topics
• CSPT 501 : Contemporary Cultural Social and Political Thought I
• CSPT 601 : Contemporary Cultural Social and Political Thought II

Selected publications

 

Books

Under the pen name Loumille Métros. Taunting the Useful. New York: Punctum Books (2024): https://punctumbooks.com/titles/taunting-the-useful/

Mallarmésis: Mythopoétique de Stéphane Mallarmé. New York: Peter Lang, 2011.

Articles 

“Agamben's Posthuman Mediality: Ethics, History and Language” in Symposium. Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy (forthcoming).

“Benveniste inconnu ? Petite histoire d’une non-réception américaine” in Émile Benveniste 50 ans après les Problèmes de linguistique générale. Irène Fenoglio and Giuseppe d’Ottavi (eds.), Paris: Éditions rue d’Ulm. 2019.

“Taunting the Useful: Wondrous Gestural Potential (with Agamben)” in David Cecchetto (ed.). Phono-Fictions and Other Felt Thoughts. Victoria, Seattle: Noxious Sector Press, 2016: 37-68.

Book review of Revisioning Europe. The Films of John Berger and Alain Tanner (University of Calgary Press, 2011), published in University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 82, Number 3, Summer 2013.

“Mallarmé’s ‘Salut’ and the Tragic ‘Acte’”, in Joseph Acquisto (ed.), Thinking Poetry: Philosophical Approaches to Nineteenth-Century French Poetry. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013: 131–148.

“Science and Symptom from Mallarmé to the Digital Poet”, Text and Image Relations in Modern European Culture, Grigorian, Natasha, Thomas Baldwin and Margaret Rigaud-Drayton (eds.). West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2012.

Selected presentations / talks / workshops

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Current research projects / information

 “We Keep Being Modern” is a book project for rethinking posthumanism in response to theories such as Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT). It looks at how modern science has conflated the “common sensibles” with consciousness, and how this error keeps reproducing itself. Yet, while we “keep being modern,”  it says “let’s be modern,” much in the way we say “le roi est mort. Vive le roi!”

 “The Cinema of Lost Gestures” is a long-term project that examines gestures appearing and reappearing intertextually in postwar and contemporary cinema, particularly in the New Wave and in Contemporary filmmakers such as Christophe Honoré.