ERIC CAZDYN

e.cazdyn@utoronto.ca

 

Distinguished Professor of Aesthetics and Politics

University of Toronto

 

Eric Cazdyn is Distinguished Professor of Aesthetics and Politics at the University of Toronto (located in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Department of East Asian Studies). He teaches courses on critical and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, Marxism, film and video, architecture, illness, literature and Japan. He has written the following books: The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture and Illness (Duke, 2012); After Globalization (with Imre Szeman, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Duke, 2002); and editor of Trespasses: Selected Writings of Masao Miyoshi (Duke, 2010) and Disastrous Consequences (SAQ, 2007). Cazdyn’s newest book, Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (with Marcus Boon and Timothy Morton, University of Chicago Press, 2015), is an attempt to reclaim for our present moment three desires that are regularly laughed out of polite conversation: “Enlightenment”, “Cure”, and “Revolution”. Cazdyn has been a visiting professor at The University of Sao Paulo, Central European University, The University of Alberta, Kings College and The University of California, Los Angeles.  Cazdyn is also a filmmaker and is currently experimenting with the “live-essay film”–in a long-term project called “The Blindspot Variations.” In 2012, Cazdyn received a three year Mellon Foundation’s New Directions Fellowship, during which he pushed his film practice and connected it to his writing, performance and installation work. Cazdyn’s films have been screened and performed in Japan, Canada, the US, and throughout Europe. In 2013 he was Artist in Residency (with Eric Chenaux) at the The Cube Microcinema (Bristol) and in 2016 (winter) Artist in Residence at Gallery TPW. In Fall-Winter 2016, Cazdyn will be a Fellow at the American Academy of Rome.

A red thread that connects Cazdyn’s work? An obsession with how impossibilities of all kind (political, aesthetic, personal) are engaged.