Stella Gaon is Professor of political theory in the Department of Political Science and Global Development Studies, and Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Women and Gender Studies, at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, N.S., Canada. Gaon is the editor of Democracy in Crisis: Violence, Alterity, Community (Manchester UP) and the author of The Lucid Vigil: Deconstruction, Desire, and the Politics of Critique (Routledge), which was awarded the 2020 Book Prize of Symposium: Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy. Gaon has published numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews on Derridean deconstruction, Frankfurt School critical theory, post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory (particularly that of Jean Laplanche), democratic theory, and contemporary continental philosophy. These essays appear in such journals as Derrida Today, The Review of Politics, the Berlin Journal of Critical Theory, the Journal of Comparative and Continental Philosophy, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Mosaic, Philosophy Today, The Journal for Cultural Research, and Rethinking Marxism, among others. Gaon’s current work concerns the broad question of how to mobilize the logic, ethics, and politics of deconstruction to inform and revitalize the field of critical political theory. This entails paying particular attention to a potential nexus between deconstruction, Adorno’s negative dialectics; Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis, and Marxian political economy.
