Overview
Professor Waite is also in the Fields of Comparative Literature and Visual Studies. His teaching and research take a point of departure from Jane Ellen Harrison’s thesis, “The oldest things lie deepest and live longest” (Themis, 1912), that is, from interest in the afterlife of archaic and ancient thinking in modern and postmodern philosophical, literary, and visual production. His writing includes work on Althusser, Bataille, David Cronenberg, Marcel Detienne, Gadamer, Gramsci, Lionel Feininger, Freud, Heidegger, Hölderlin, Kôjin Karatani, Kleist, Lacan, Henri Lefebvre, Lenin, Marx, Nicole Loraux, Nietzsche, Schelling, Carl Schmitt, Spinoza, Leo Strauss, Velázquez, Aby Warburg, Wilhelm Worringer.
Office Hours
By appointment at 191 Goldwin Smith Hall. Please email gcw1@cornell.edu to confirm or cancel appointment.
Research Focus
- Intersections between premodern philosophy and postmodern junk culture
- Spinoza reception (Strauss, Althusser, Deleuze, Negri)
- Communist cultural and political theory
Publications
- Nietzsche’s Corps/e: Aesthetics, Politics, Prophecy, or, The Spectacular Technoculture of Everyday Life. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996; Post-Contemporary Interventions, ed. Fredric Jameson and Stanley Fish). Second edition 1998.
- “Heidegger, Schmitt, Strauss: The Hidden Monologue, or, Conserving Esotericism to Justify the High Hand of Violence.” Cultural Critique 69 (Spring 2008): 113-44.
- “Lefebvre without Heidegger: Left-Heidegerianism qua contradictio in adiecto.” Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre. Ed. Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgram, Christian Schmid. (London: Routledge, 2008), 94-112.
- “A Short Political Philology of Visceral Reason (A Red Mouse’s Long Tail).” Parallax 36 (July-September 2005): 8-27.
- “Radio Nietzsche, or, How to Fall Short of Philosophy.” Gadamer’s Repercussions: Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics. Ed. Bruce Krajewski. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 169-211.
- “Salutations.” In the above anthology, 256-306.
- “Hölderlin with Nietzsche in Two Wars, 1916–1946.” Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of Philosophy. Ed. Jacob Golumb and Robert S. Wistrich. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 196-214.
- “Nietzsche’s Baudelaire, or, The Sublime Proleptic Spin of His Politico-Economic Thought.” Representations 50 (Spring 1995): 14–52.
- “Lenin in las meninas: An Essay in Historical-Materialist Vision.” History and Theory 35:3 (1986): 248-84.
