Liran Razinsky is an associate professor in the program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar Ilan University, Israel, working on Psychoanalysis, French and Comparative Literature (20th and 21st century), Critical Theory and Critique of digital technology. He has published Freud, Psychoanalysis and Death (Cambridge University Press, 2013), a critique of the psychoanalytic approach to death, co-edited Writing the Holocaust Today: Critical Perspectives on The Kindly Ones (Rodopi, 2012), and edited a special issue of Yale French Studies, Writing and Life, Literature and History: On Jorge Semprun.

He has written papers on Bataille, Jonathan Littell, Maupassant, Albert Cohen, Leiris, Khoury, Semprun, Freud and Psychoanalytic Theory, and on topics such as autobiography and self-representation, death, holocaust literature, digital memory.

His current project, The Human Being in the Age of Data, investigates how human subjectivity changes with the rise of data-led algorithmic understanding of individuals, and how algorithmic knowledge interacts with human-centered worlds of meaning. This project has won a 4 years grant from the Israel Science Foundation.

Another research project (currently on hold) is “Fantasies of Self-Representation: From Classical Autobiography to the Digital Age.” It focuses the stakes involved with representing oneself, both in autobiography and in more everyday self representation. Several papers issuing from that project have been published.

Fields of Research

Critical research of Algorithms and Data

Autobiography and self-representation (relationship between authors and their texts)

French and comparative literature (mostly 20th and 21st century)

Critical Theory

Holocaust Literature

Death

Psychoanalysis, Freud