The global intellectual history of Marx and Marxism since the nineteenth century; the development of Marxist theory after poststructuralism and the critique of essentialism – humanism and anti-humanism, capital and its ‘outside’, the politics and theory of the subject.

The national question today, on a global scale: nationalism, imperialism, uneven development, language, translation, globalisation and the postcolonial; the nation as a zone of engagement for the humanities (with particular attention to Canada and Québec).

Comparative literature and the status of ‘theory’ within the humanities today; its relation to institutions, especially the contemporary university; critical analysis of ‘area studies’, the language disciplines, and the constitution of the theoretical humanities in the history of knowledge-production.

Political economy of global capitalism; primitive accumulation and the theory of the transition; the logical and the historical in the development of capital as a relation; global debates on the origins of capitalism; the category of labour power in its philosophical dimensions; the relation between the ‘system’ of capital and the politicality of its exterior.

Literary criticism as a method of historical, philosophical, and political investigations; the ‘reading protocols’ of the literary text as a mode of historical and political analysis; the literary, tropic, and psychoanalytic structure of the historical: allegory, metonymy, transference, retrospection, the symptom, and more.

Philosophy, literature, criticism, psychoanalysis and culture’s relation to a politics of emancipation in the wake of 1968. The contemporary analysis of the political conjuncture after neoliberalism: populism, late fascism, new nationalisms and the cultural politics of the new right.