Saul Anton

Saul Anton’s research interests include critical theory, aesthetics, and the visual arts, modern and contemporary art and culture, the European Enlightenment, and continental philosophy. He has published scholarly articles about Diderot, Rousseau, Kant, Winckelmann, Agamben, Nancy, and others. He is the author of Lee Friedlander: The Little Screens (2015), the experimental critical fiction Warhol’s Dream (2007), and the translator of Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Discourse of the Syncope: Logodaedalus (Stanford University Press, 2008). He is also the editor of Roxy Paine: The Dioramas (Skira, 2021). His cultural journalism and criticism has appeared in Artforum, frieze, Bookforum, Afterall, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. He is a contributing editor of Cabinet magazine.

His current book project, Sovereignty in Ruins: Aesthetics, Form, and the Afterlives of Political Authority examines how images, texts, and objects both stage and fracture the claims of power and traces an alternate genealogy of political authority through aesthetic form and challenges to it in early modern political philosophy, absolutism, French Enlightenment literature, philosophy, and art, and photography and contemporary continental thought.

He is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and he will be a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome in May/June 2026.

At Pratt, Saul teaches a wide range of courses, including Horror and Monstrosity, World Literature, Intensive Film Theory, and Contemporary Media Theory. He is the former Coordinator of the Architecture Degree Projects Writing Program, in which he teaches regularly. He has also taught at The New School University, New York University, and Princeton University.

Ph.D. Princeton University

B.A. University of Michigan

Recent Articles and Essays:

“Babbling Cosmopolitanism: Commerce and the Ruins of Sovereignty in Diderot’s Mélanges pour Catherine II,” Diderot Studies, forthcoming, 2026.

“The Monster’s Monster,” The Brooklyn Rail, March 2026: https://brooklynrail.org/2026/03/art/the-monsters-monster/

“Diderot’s Anarcheological Museum,” in Diderot et l’Archéologie, eds. Lorenz E. Baumer, Fayçal Falaky, and Zeina Hakim (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2024), pp. 149-166. DOI : 10.48611/isbn.978-2-406-16579-8.p.0149

“Rousseau’s Shameless Beginnings,” Parallax, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2023), pp. 291-303.

“The Parallax View: Spectacle and Memory in Roxy Paine’s Dioramas,” in Roxy Paine: Dioramas, ed. Saul Anton, pp. 141-147.

Books

Roxy Paine: The Dioramas (Skira, 2021). Editor.

Lee Friedlander: The Little Screens (Afterall/MIT Press, 2015)

Warhol’s Dream (les presses du réel, 2007)