Stella Gaon
Faculty of Arts
Political Science
Professor
Office: MN 402
Phone: 902-420-5843
Email: stella.gaon@smu.ca
Stella Gaon is Full Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at Saint Mary’s University. She is the author of The Lucid Vigil: Deconstruction, Desire, and the Politics of Critique (Routledge 2019), which was awarded the 2020 Book Prize of Symposium: Canadian Journal for Continental Philosophy, and the editor of Democracy in Crisis: Violence, Alterity, Community (Manchester University Press, 2010). Dr. Gaon has also published numerous articles in such journals as Philosophy & Social Criticism, Derrida Today, Mosaic, Rethinking Marxism, the Journal of Philosophy of Education, the Journal for Cultural Research, and the Review of Politics. Teaching responsibilities in the field of political philosophy includes courses on the history of political thought as well as courses that draw on contemporary political theory to explore questions about human rights, democracy, Marxism, and the state. Dr. Gaon has delivered over 50 papers or guest lectures in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, and currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Derrida Today and Philosophy, Politics, and Critique.
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Academic research page →Current work involves investigating 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 exploring relationship between deconstruction and Marxian political economy, because the articulation of that relationship can help to explain how “abstract domination,” that is, the bifurcation of social life into dominants and subalterns, operates as a material force in society. If abstract domination has concrete effects, then the deconstructive critique of what Marx called “real abstraction” could correlate with a material intervention into politics.
Other areas of research interest include the role of radical political critique for critical approaches to phenomenology, the political purchase of psychoanalytic theory for critical theory, and the critical-political significance of deconstruction in the context of current debates about its normative foundations and its ethical reach.
Dr. Gaon specializes in contemporary social and political theory, focusing particularly on the deconstructive thought of Jacques Derrida. Other areas of research interest include Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, critical legal theory, and continental and political philosophy.
PhD, University of Toronto, MA, Concordia University, and BA (Honours, with Distinction), Concordia University. Dr. Gaon held the Grant Notley Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta from 2002-2003.