Adam R. Rosenthal

B.A. in Philosophy from Pennsylvania State University

Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Emory University

Dr. Rosenthal’s research interests include Poetry and Poetics, Deconstruction, Nineteenth-Century European and American Literature, and Continental Philosophy. His work is particularly focused on the intersections of philosophical inquiry and literary writing. His first book, Poetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press (2022). In it, he diagnoses the Western poetic tradition’s determinative association of poetry with giving. In readings that span the classical period up through twenty-first century conceptual poetics, the book argues that the gift represents at one and the same time poetry’s most extreme aneconomic privilege and the point of its closest contact with the interested exchange of the market. The gift structures poetic discourse. In this way, he argues, it remains a highly ambivalent figure that betrays poetry’s longstanding investment in anthropocentric notions of exclusively human language.

Dr. Rosenthal is also the editor or co-editor of three special issues of journals: “Derrida’s Classroom,” Poetics Today 42.1 (2021), “Geschlecht III and the Problem of ‘National-Humanism’,” with Rodrigo Therezo, Política común 14 (2020), and “Deconstruction and the Survival of Love,” with Luke Donahue, Oxford Literary Review 40.2 (2018). He has published essays in SubStance, Studies in Romanticism, Modern Language Notes, and Nineteenth-Century French Studies on topics such as Romantic poetry, cloning, Derridean deconstruction, Heidegger’s philosophy, and Baudelaire’s critical writings. He currently serves as Associate Editor to the Online Archive of the Seminars and Courses of Jacques Derrida.

Current Research Projects

Dr. Rosenthal’s current book project, Prosthetic Immortalities: Deconstruction, Transhumanism, and the Promise of Eternal Life, investigates the philosophical significance of new forms of “indefinite life” and “biological immortality.” It argues that the discovery of biological immortals—lifeforms that naturally have indefinitely long lifespans, such as cancer cells and bacteria—present novel conceptual difficulties for traditional philosophical approaches to finitude. These difficulties are at least twofold: First, they disrupt traditional narratives concerning the inveterate mortality of biological forms of life. Second, the specific structure of existence, or finitude, of a “biological immortal,” is difficult to conceive on the model of Heideggerian being-toward-death. Prosthetic Immortalities clarifies the meaning of indefinite life from within the discourse of Heideggerian ontology and Derridean deconstruction. In this way, it intervenes in current debates in posthumanism and aims to rearticulate the relationship between post-Heideggerian philosophy and transhumanism.