Profile

Aukje van Rooden specializes in Philosophy of Art and Culture. Her research expertise is in the field of contemporary continental, particularly French, philosophy and its applications within literary and cultural studies. Inspired by the philosophical tradition starting with Nietzsche and German Romanticism, but especially including the post-Heideggerian French philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, she takes language, and more specifically literary uses of language, as the defining characteristic of human being, especially in its modern condition. In (re)thinking the modern human condition, she has developed a line of research that focuses particularly on issues of relationality, community and engagement. Van Rooden has published the following books: L'Intrigue dénouée. Mythe, littérature et communauté dans la pensée de Jean-Luc Nancy (Brill 2022), Literature, Autonomy and Commitment (Bloomsbury 2019), Literatuur, autonomie en engagement: Pleidooi voor een nieuw paradigma (Amsterdam University Press 2015), Re-treating Religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy (Fordham University Press 2012, co-edited) and De nieuwe Franse Filosofie: Denkers en thema's voor de 21e eeuw (Boom 2011, co-edited).

Van Rooden has been postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University (2010-2012), visiting researcher at Radboud University (2006-2009), Université Paris VIII-Vincennes-Saint-Denis (2008) and Université Paris IV-Sorbonne (2004-2005), and visiting lecturer at the Art Academy Avans-St Joost (2005). She is member of the scientific advisory boards of the journals Tijdschrift voor Filosofie and Wijsgerig Perspectief and of the Maurice Blanchot Archives in Paris. Van Rooden is also translator from the French (of works by Blanchot, Nancy and Rancière) and one of the chief editors of Dutch publishing house Parresia (publising works by Blanchot, Foucault, Cixous, Irigaray, Duras, Badiou a.o.).

Aukje van Rooden has cum laude degrees in Philosophy and in Literary and Culture Studies. In 2010, she received her Ph.D from Tilburg University, also cum laude.

Past and present research projects

• 2019 - present | New Forms of Engagement

Investigating new forms of engagement in and through writing - especially in contemporary millennial literature - by taking cue from a relational  ontology of literature. This boils down to a rethinking of, amongst others, themes like responsibility and the 'self' in relation to literature.

• 2010 - 2019 | Towards a Relational Paradigm

Investigating the shift from thinking about modern art and literature in terms of aesthetic autonomy towards a new, post-romantic paradigm, in which art and literature are conceived in terms of relationality. This boils down to rethinking of literature's ontology, i.e. way of being in the world.

• 2004 - 2010 | The Literary in Contemporary French Philosophy

Investigating the important role of the literary, in relation to the political and the social, in the work of amongst others Sartre, Blanchot, Bataille, Lyotard, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Foucault, Badiou and Rancière.