Peter Fenves, Joan and Sarepta Harrison Professor of Literature, Professor of German and Jewish Studies, Co-director of the Program in Comparative Literary Studies, Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Political Science, is the author of A Peculiar Fate:   Metaphysics and World-History in Kant (Cornell University Press, 1991), " Chatter:"  Language and History in Kierkegaard (Stanford University Press, 1993), Arresting Language: From Leibniz to Benjamin (Stanford University Press, 2001), and most recently Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth (Routledge, 2003).   He is also the editor of Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Kant, Transformative Critique by Derrida (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), the co-editor of "The Spirit of Poesy:"  Essays on Jewish and German Literature and Philosophy in Honor of Géza von Molnár (Northwestern University Press, 2000), and the translator of Werner Hamacher's Premises: Literature and Philosophy from Kant to Celan (Harvard University Press, 1996).   Recently he has written a new introduction to Max Brod's novel, Tycho Brahe's Path to God (Northwestern University Press, 2006).

Professor Fenves has also written numerous articles on German literature and philosophy as well as contemporary French thought, including "Marx's Doctoral Thesis on Two Greek Atomists and the Post-Kantian Interpretations," The Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1986); "Image and Chatter: Adorno's Construction of Kierkegaard," Diacritics 22 (1992);   "From Empiricism to the Experience of Freedom," Paragraph 16 (1993);   "Continuing the Fiction: From Leibniz' 'petite fable' to Kafka's In der Strafkolonie," MLN 116 (2001);   "Of Philosophical Style--From Leibniz to Benjamin," Boundary 2 30 (2003);   "Marx, Mourning, Messianicity," in Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination, ed. Samuel Weber and Hent de Vries; "Die Scham der Schönheit: einige Bemerkungen zu Stifter," in "Geteilte Aufmerksamkeit:" Zur Frage des Lesens, ed. Thomas Schestag; "Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin," in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly; "Measure for Measure:   Hölderlin and the Place of Philosophy," in The Solid Letter: New Readings of Friedrich Hölderlin, ed. Aris Fioretos;   "Die Unterlassung der Übersetzung," in Übersetzen: Walter Benjamin, ed. Christiaan L. Hart-Nibbrig;   "The Revelation of Irony: The Young Kierkegaard Listens to the Old Schelling," in International Kierkegaard Commentary:  "The Concept of Irony ," ed. Robert Perkins;   "Derrida and History: Some Questions Derrida Pursues in his Early Writings," in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom Cohen;   "What is Aufklärung (in Pennsylvania)?" in American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni, ed. Marc Shell.  

Among his current projects is a study entitled The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Abstention from Philosophy, preliminary parts of which will be published in Walter Benjamin Studies (Continuum, 2005) and in the Benjamin-Handbuch (Metzler, 2006).   For the Gauss Lectures at Princeton University in the Fall of 2006 he will be giving a preliminary version of his work in progress, No One's Thing: The Idea of "Res Nullius" and the Search for a Critique of Violence.