Samuel Weber - Biography

Samuel Weber, Ph.D., (b. in New York) is Paul de Man Chair at the European Graduate School EGS, the Avalon Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University, and one of the leading American thinkers across the disciplines of literary theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Samuel Weber has been Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Director of its Paris Program in Critical Theory.

Samuel Weber graduated from Cornell University in 1960, and he then pursued his graduate education in Europe, primarily in Germany. It was during his studies abroad that he first encountered the work of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He was strongly influenced by the work of Theodor W. Adorno, eventually coming to translate his major work of critical theory – Prisms – into English. This translation, including an introduction by Samuel Weber, was of crucial importance in the reception of the work of Theodor W. Adorno in the Anglophone world.

Samuel Weber is not only distinguished for having introduced major elements of the Frankfurt School to English speakers; he also brought the Bhaktin circle and deconstruction to the attention of many in America, both through his work as co-founder and editor of the journal Glyph and his scholarly translations of original texts. In addition to Adorno, Samuel Weber also translated Jacques Derrida's 'Signature Event Context' (1977) and 'Limited, Inc.' (1988). Samuel Weber was trained under Paul de Man. Not being limited to the sphere of academia, Samuel Weber also served as a dramaturge to German opera houses and theaters in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, and Ludwigsburg during the 1980s.

His book Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis (1978, 1991), originally written in German, has been groundbreaking in the fields of psychoanalysis and literary theory. Several of his books are being brought out by Beijing University Press in Chinese translation. Samuel Weber was visiting professor at many universities in France and Germany, and taught at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris and the Free University of Berlin. In the United States, he taught at UCLA and Johns Hopkins University.

A few of the books which Samuel Weber has published: Unwrapping Balzac (1979); Mass Mediaurus: Form, Technics, Media (1996); The Legend of Freud (2000); Institution and Interpretation (2001); Theatricality as Medium (2004); Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking (2005); and Acts of Reading (2006).