Jeff Fort

Research Interest(s):

• Twentieth century French studies
• Philosophy and Critical Theory
• Film (especially postwar French film)

Profile:

Jeff Fort's research and teaching interests include twentieth century French studies; film studies; critical theory, including modern German philosophy from Kant to Heidegger; twentieth century French thought. Much of his research has focused on the work of Maurice Blanchot, as well as on German authors such as Kafka and Nietzsche. He has done extensive work as a translator. His translations include: Maurice Blanchot, Aminadab; Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy; Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image and Corpus III; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry and Poetics of History; Jacques Roubaud, The Loop, and Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography. He has published a book with Fordham University Press entitled The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett (2014). He has recently published articles on Maurice Blanchot, André Bazin, Agnès Varda, and Roland Barthes. His current research project has the working title Effacements: Blanchot, the Deathly Image, and the Cinema of Disfiguration.

Selected Publications:

Academic book:

The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett. Fordham University Press, 2014.

Poetry book:

Disintegration and Other Poems. Atopon Books, 2024.

Recent articles:

• “Paris Centrifuge: Cléo de 5 à 7 in Black and White, or: the Masks of Colonialism.” Telos, 197 (Winter 2021), special issue: The Modern City in World Cinema, eds. Sheldon Lu and Jaimey Fisher, 79-100.
• “André Bazin’s Eternal Returns: An Ontological Revision.” Film-Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press), vol. 25, no. 1, February 2021, 42–61.
• “L’Antichambre littéraire: Roland Barthes’ Regressive Search.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 53.4, December 2020. Special Issue on Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, 23-48. 
• “Rumors of the Outside: Blanchot’s Murmurs and the Indistinction of Literature.” Angelaki, vol. 23, no. 3, 2018. Special issue: “Sounds of Disaster: Sonic Encounters with Blanchot,” ed. Adam Potts, pp 158-177.
• “The Look of Nothingness: Blanchot and the Image.” In Understanding Blanchot, Understanding Modernism, ed. Christopher Langlois (“Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism” series). Bloomsbury Press, 2018.

Recent translations:

• Jean-Luc Nancy, L'Intrus and other texts, published with an "Introduction" as The Intruder, Fordham University Press, 2024
• Jean-Luc Nancy, Cruor, published in Corpus III: Cruor and Other Writings. Fordham University Press, 2023.

Current Projects:

Effacements: Blanchot, the Deathly Image, and the Cinema of Disfiguration (working title).

Beginning with Maurice Blanchot's writings on the image, and including some of his fictional works that feature specific deathly images (that is, images that emblematize death, such as the death mask, or the corpse itself), the study seeks to link Blanchot's thought and fiction with cinema, partly by way of André Bazin, whose discussion of film's "realism" include images similar to those found in Blanchot (including a death mask). Branching out from there, the study also examines writers and filmmakers such as Roland Barthes, Robert Bresson, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and Agnès Varda. The presence of African masks and statues in the work of these latter three filmmakers further opens an investigation into the occluded, and at times officially censored, relationship between postwar French cinema and the dying French empire.