Duane Rousselle

Duane was born in Miramichi, New Brunswick to Catholic parents. He attended the New Brunswick Community College and graduated with a diploma in Electronic Game Design.[4][5] After participating in a hunger strike for admittance, he was accepted as a Sociology Major at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. During this first year of his university education, he experienced devastating poverty, sleeping on park benches. He received numerous prestigious awards, including the Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick silver medal for excellence in scholarship.[6][7]

He went on to complete a Master's degree in Sociology from the University of New Brunswick before joining the PhD program in Cultural Studies from Trent University,[8] Peterborough (Ontario, Canada). During his time in Peterborough, Ontario, he became a Freemason.[9] He was awarded the Governor General of Canada Gold Medal for his research into clinical psychoanalysis and continental philosophy.[10]

He studied also at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland,[11] working as an assistant for Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou.

In 2016, Duane raised more than $100,000 to help rebuild a mosque that was attacked in a hate crime in Peterborough, Ontario.[12][13] His efforts received international attention and he was invited for a private meeting with the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau.[14] This was the subject of a documentary film by Matthew Hayes, The Masjid.[15][16] Duane received several death threats at this time and went into hiding.[17]

Duane converted to Islam in order to marry his partner.[18] This relationship was documented by Colin Boyd Shafer in his documentary photo exhibit Interlove Project.[19][20] Duane is no longer married.

In 2019, Duane moved to Mumbai, India. In 2020, he returned to Canada and accepted an appointment to teach at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario.[21]

Duane Rousselle describes his approach to sociological theory in the following way:

Why, then, do I intend to avoid coherent introductions, sustained overviews, and/or consistent bodies of knowledge? When knowledge is the agent of a discourse -- that is, when, from the place of knowledge, there is an interrogation of that which has not yet been interrogated or not yet known -- we can be sure we are within what Jacques Lacan named the 'university discourse.' [...] Many sociologists will be disappointed [...] because [this work] aims to frustrate the demand for a consistent body of knowledge. The academic sociologist might therefore inquire into the lack of comprehensiveness or into the various exclusions or lack of detail concerning several major early American sociologists [...] Or perhaps the academic sociologist might expose an inadequacy in the various summaries of the work of George Herbert Mead, Talcott Parsons, C. Wright Mills, Erving Goffman, Charles Horton Cooley, or even, why not, Jacques Lacan. Similarly, an academic reader might protest that this text does not extensively delineate or explicate the various [...] schools of sociological thought such as conflict theory, structural-functionalism, systems theory, symbolic interactionism, applied sociology, and so on. My claim is that these demands demonstrate something important about the discourse from which the American sociologist is inevitably trained to speak.[22]

By contrast, Rousselle's work draws a distinction between 'analytic discourse' and 'university discourse':

[T]he former is aimed at making an intervention into another discourse by engaging with its foundational presuppositions, and the latter intends only to increase the scope of its own knowledge (which is fundamentally built around an unacknowledged and latent presupposition.[23]

This technique is repeated many of his other publications, including Gender, Sexuality & Subjectivity where Rousselle links the notion of 'intervention' with that of 'invention,' and offers a pathway forward for thinking about queer and trans* theory.

Rousselle's contribution to the field of study known as post-anarchism has occurred through several venues. First, in After Post-Anarchism he demonstrated that post-anarchism is an attempt to understand the logical movement of thinking within the field of anarchist studies. By examining the work of Georges Bataille he demonstrated that there is another possible pathway forward. He wrote:

We can now distinguish three stages in the life of post-anarchism. First, we can deduce what Sureyyya Evren has described as its introductory period [...] defined by its inability to side-step the ontological problem in the literature of classical anarchism. During this period, post-anarchism needed to distinguish itself from classical anarchism while nonetheless remaining committed to its ethical project. The second period overcomes the problem of the separation of post-anarchism from classical anarchism by re-reading the classical tradition as essentially post-anarchistic. Some of the critiques of post-anarchism are included into this period insofar as post-anarchism, for them, was always already anarchism. Whereas the first and second phases included only explicitly anarchist literature under their rubric of worthwhile investigation, in the third period this no longer holds true. To be certain the second period permitted the incorporation of post-structuralist literature into post-anarchist discussions, but always with a certain amount of reservation. The third period, the one that is to come--the one that is already here if only we would heed its call--will not take such care with attempts at identification or canonization. An after to post-anarchism is no joke, it is already here, like a seed beneath the snow, waiting to be discovered.[24]

His work went on to demonstrate that post-anarchism's attack on representative ontologies meant that it was forced to avoid entirely all ontological questions. The third period of post-anarchism will therefore be an attempt to return to a non-essentialist and non-representative ontology. This was the approach he and Jason Adams attempted to open up in a special issue of Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies.[25]

Duane helped to popularize the field of post-anarchism also through an inaugural issue of Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies[26] titled "Post-Anarchism Today" which included a number of the most popular post-anarchist scholars and art from the Turkish art collective ic-mihrak.[27] He and Sureyyya Evren also published an edited anthology titled Post-Anarchism: A Reader with Pluto Press.[28]

Lacanian Realism was the first known sustained attempt to engage Lacanian psychoanalysis with thinking in the field of philosophical new realism. Katerina Kolozova, in her preface to the book, wrote:

Rousselle's book is the first extensive and compelling elaboration of a proposal made by Slavoj Zizek almost fifteen years ago -- to reintroduce the Lacanian Real into the political discourses of the twenty-first century. It coincides with similar projects undertaken by the political theory influenced by Francois Laruelle, Alain Badiou, and a number of variations of what is habitually dubbed as 'speculative realism,' in particular in the niches of gender and queer theory in object oriented ontologies, non-philosophy, and its version of posthumanism.[29]

Rousselle himself writes about his project in the following way:

I claim that Lacanians have been preoccupied with a particular modality of the real, one that insists on interrupting, limiting, or exceeding the various orders or agencies of the human mind. For example, this is the salient position of Slavoj Zizek, Alenka Zupancic, Bruce Fink, Lorenzo Chiesa, Joan Copjec, and many others. It is also frequently the position of Jacques Lacan. [...] One must, as a consequence of holding this position, bracket questions pertaining to things outside of the symbolic and imaginary psychical systems. Careful study exposes the extent to which this position has influenced each of the major fields of research inspired by Jacques Lacan: clinical psychoanalysis, radical political theory, and mathematical topology. My task has been to explore the consequent occlusion that psychoanalysis has suffered in each of these three fields and to tease out the possibility of a return to the subject of the real.[30]

With the publication of Gender, Sexuality and Subjectivity,[31] Rousselle begins to retroactively describe his work as 'interventionist.' His attempt is to use Lacanian logic to resituate the terms of debate between queer and trans* theories.

He does a brief and yet critical examination of the field of gender theory to demonstrate the way in which "progressive gender theories sometimes appeared [...] to be regressive, and vice versa. The only way forward was to consider the ostensibly absurd possibility that [gender theories] be understood as a surface akin to a sheet of paper. This surface might be vectorized and the short edge twisted one hundred and eighty degrees and reattached to the other short edge. A continuous non-orientable surface was invented, whicha counted for the possible movement from progressive to regressive or reactionary gender politics." [32] Rousselle therefore introduces a topological meta-theoretical model for situating the interventions of gender theorists.

His argument is that gender theory exists as a debate between ontology and epistemology, being and discourse, and that this leads theorists to conclude that the penultimate contribution of queer theory, derived from social constructionism and related schools of thought, is the malleability of language. The major contribution of trans* is a notion of invention. Therefore, "the controversial claim of this book is that queer theory and intersectionality - and, more broadly, the social constructionist paradigm - have reached their limit. Indeed, it is possible that they are now regressive theories. However, it is possible to move forward into a new paradigm through a logic that Rousselle names 'gender invention.'"[33]

• Post-Anarchism: A Reader (Pluto Books)[34]
• After Post-Anarchism (Repartee Books/LBC)[35]
• Lacanian Realism: Political and Clinical Psychoanalysis (Bloomsbury Books)[36]
• Jacques Lacan and American Sociology: Be Wary of the Image (Palgrave)[37]
• Gender, Sexuality, and Subjectivity: A Lacanian Perspective on Identity, Language and Queer Theory (Routledge)
• On Love: Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Society (forthcoming)

• “Jacques Lacan,” Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible[38] (Vlad Glaveanu, Ed.). Palgrave MacMillan. 2019.
• “Imaginary, Symbolic, Real,” The Zizek Dictionary[39] (Rex Butler, ed.). New York, NY: AcumenPublishing. pp. 213–6. 2014.
• “Preface,” Post-Anarchism: A Reader[40] (Sureyya Evren, Duane Rousselle, eds.). London: Pluto Press.pp. vii-ix. 2011.

• “Islamic Ethics: ‘We Must Come to Common Terms,"[41] The Philosophical Salon: London Review of Books. [Article has been translated into Arabic at "Mouminoun Without Borders,”[42] one of the most popular Arabic-speaking think -tanks]
• “The Little objet a of Anarchist Philosophy,”[43] Continental Thought & Theory. Vol 3. No. 1. pp. 285–96.(2019)
• “Love Must Be Reinvented,”[44] (translated work for Alain Badiou).Theory & Event. Vol. 22., No. 4. (2019)
• “Lacanian Psychoanalysis in the Twenty-First Century,”[45] Psychoanalytic Discourse. No. 5. (2018)
• “A Portrait of Baudelaire as a ‘Man of Genius:’ Ordinary Psychosis within the Age of Modernity.”[46] Psychoanalysis Lacan. Volume 3. (2017)
• “Reconsidering the Newest Social Movements from the Perspective of Lacanian Sociology,”[47] Anarchist Studies. Vol. 25, No. 2: 26-45. (2017)
• “Numbers & Things: A Contribution to Number Theory within Lacanian Psychoanalytic Theory,” S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique. Special Issue: “Capitalism and Psychoanalysis” (John Holland, Ed.). Vol. 8: 141-72. (2016)
• “Obsession & Politics: A Contribution to Lacanian Political Psychoanalysis,”[48] Psychoanalysis,Culture & Society. Vol. 21, No. 4: 348-67. (2016)
• “On the Difference Between Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy,"[49] by Jean-Gérard Bursztein. Psychoanalytic Discourse / Discours Psychoanalytique (PSYAD). Vol. 1, No. 2: 75-6. (2016)
• “Against Understanding: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key, by Bruce Fink” The Psychoanalytic Review. Vol. 102, No. 4: 602-4. (2015).
• “Demanding the Impossible,”[50] Information, Communication and Society. Vol. 17, No. 10: 1304-5. (2014)
• “On the Names of the Father,” Interstitial: A Journal of Modern Culture and Events. (January) Unpaginated. (2014)
• “The Triumph of Religion,"[51] Interstitial: A Journal of Modern Culture and Events. (December) Unpaginated. (2013)
• “The New Hysterical Question,” Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious. Special Issue on the Psychoanalytic Object (Joan Copjec, Chris Sylvester, Eds.): 71-88. (2013)
• “Post-Anarchism and Its Critics” (Duane Rousselle & Saul Newman), Anarchist Studies. Vol. 21,No. 2: 74-96. (2013)
• “Max Stirner’s Post-Post-Anarchism,”[52] Journal for the Study of Radicalism. Vol. 7, No. 1: 157-65. (2013)
• “Georges Bataille’s Post-Anarchism,”[53] Journal of Political Ideologies. Vol. 17, No. 3: 235-57. (2012)
• “Torn from Ghostly Hands, The Object’s Property,”[54] In Media Res. Special Issue: “Anti-Intellectual Property” (Kris Coffield, Ed.). Vol. 9, No. 17. unpaginated (2012)
• “Postmodern Pollution,”[55] C-Theory: Theory, Technology, and Culture. Vol. 35, No. 1-2. Unpaginated. (2012)
• “What Comes After Post-Anarchism?”[56] Continental Journal. Vol. 2, No. 2: 152-154. (2012)
• “Scruples: Rules of Play: A Lacanian Detournement of Scrabble”[57] International Journal of Zizek Studies. Vol. 6, No. 3., Unpaginated. (2012)
• “Symptom or Sinthome?,"[58] International Journal of Zizek Studies. Vol. 4, No. 1. Unpaginated. Non-Refereed & Popular Press (2010)