Nir Kedem is assistant professor of cultural studies at Sapir College, and lectures in literature, queer theory, and film at Tel Aviv University. He is currently working on two scholarly monographs: one in English, titled A Deleuzian Critique of Queer Thought: Overcoming Sexuality; and another in Hebrew, tentatively titled Untimely Queer: Deleuze and Cinema beyond Desire. Although independent from one another, the two monographs together comprise a single critical project that systematically employs Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical method and political pragmatics in order to offer a total reconstruction of “queer” as a radical concept for thought, action and analysis. To this end, Kedem uses Deleuze’s form of immanent critique to rethink and articulate anew the philosophical and geopolitical conditions for the emergence of queer theory (in Philosophically Queer) and of New Queer Cinema [NQC] (in Untimely Queer) in the United States, as well as to evaluate both queer theory’s and NQC’s critical potential to transform our ways of thinking, creating and acting in today’s control societies.
His research centers on Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, conceptualizations of body and time in feminism and queer theory, and, recently, animality and the figure of the inhuman in literature, film and philosophy.
