Christopher Fynsk - Biography

Christopher Fynsk, Ph.D., born 1952, is the Maurice Blanchot Chair at the European Graduate School EGS, Head of the School of Language and Literature at the University of Aberdeen, and Director of the Centre for Modern Thought.

Christopher Fynsk's work is closely involved with that of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Lévinas, and several contemporary artists, including Francis Bacon and Salvatore Puglia. Christopher Fynsk is an internationally recognized Heidegger scholar and literary theorist who has worked with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy at the University of Strasbourg. He is well known for his work relating the political and literary aspects of continental philosophy.

Christopher Fynsk received his doctorate from the Department of Romance Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1981, following a Diplôme d’Etudes Avancées in Philosophy from the University of Strasbourg. He also received an MA in English from the University of California, Irvine, in 1976, and an MA in French at Johns Hopkins University in 1979. He taught at the University of Strasbourg from 1985 to 1987, and from 1981 to 2004 he worked as Professor of Comparative Literature and Philosophy, and Chair of Department of Comparative Literature at State University of New York at Binghamton. In 2004 he moved to the University of Aberdeen to join the faculty of the School of Language and Literature, and formed the Centre for Modern Thought.

Christopher Fynsk is the author of The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (2004), Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin (2000), Language and Relation: …that there is language (1996), and Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (1986). He has written numerous articles for academic journals, and he has translated works by Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Maurice Blanchot.

In his critical writings, which breach the barriers separating philosophy, literary theory, and art criticism, Christopher Fynsk is deeply engaged with the question of the possibility of language and how the human relation to Being is sketched out through literary and philosophical texts and art works. In Infant Figures, he follows a path to the realm of this question through a dialogical meditation on two texts, one by Maurice Blanchot and one by Jacques Lacan, which confront the limits of language in saying the death of a child. In the text, which is partitioned into three suggestively aligned parts in the manner similar to a Francis Bacon triptych, Christopher Fynsk follows an inquiry of the material limits of symbolic representation. The inquiry is called by 'the exigency of the figure', a primal exposure of the human being antecedent to speech and memory which opens it to the possibility of language. In order to risk the entry into this problematic, he finds it necessary to adopt an unconventional method which navigates 'between discursive orders' in a way which is theoretically akin to the methods of psychoanalysis.

Christopher Fynsk has been the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the Gilman Fellowship from Johns Hopkins University, the SUNY Research Semester Award, the University of California Regents Fellowship, and the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Research (2003).