Academic Year 2024-2025

Fall 2024

HUM 260A: Critical Theory Workshop - Cosmopolitics 

Meetings on select Wednesdays, 10 am - 1 pm

Instructor: David H. Colmenares 

If thinking is the art of discovering difference, “cosmopolitics” is the art of establishing relational grammars across species and determinations of being—a form of ontological diplomacy. In contemporary usage, it names the epistemic, political and legal strategies that seek to build human-non-human assemblages, coalitions contra naturam.

Hijacking “cosmopolitics” from Kant, Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers adopted the ancient notion of  kosmopoliḗtēs (Diog. Laert 6.63) as a leitmotif.  She proposed moving beyond the universal triumphalism of the history of science into an “ecology of practices of knowledge,” drawing inspiration from William James’ pluralism and Ernst Mach’s phenomenological constructivism. For Stengers, the ‘cosmos’ in cosmopolitics does not allude to the unified objective world of modern science, the bedrock grounding subjective or culturalist representations, but to an “unknown, constituted by multiple, divergent worlds”; a relational field of non-equivalence in which relations need to be constantly created and re-established, not discovered. Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro later called such an ontology, amply illustrated in Amerindian socio-cosmologies, “multinaturalism”.

This workshop seeks to delineate a possible genealogy of cosmopolitics as an epistemic paradigm across the humanities and social sciences as much as a political strategy. Readings will include foundational texts, such as selections from Stengers’s seven-volume Cosmopolitiques; Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet and Staying with the Trouble; and Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics. We then will revisit important essays on post-Humanism by Martin Heidegger and Peter Sloterdijk, and conduct a “conceptual history” of the categories that cosmopolitics calls into question. Thus, we will investigate the history of personhood and nature as “legal fictions” rooted in Roman law, according to French legal theorist Yan Thomas, as well as the notion of dignitas, from ancient Stoicism to the dignitiarian paradigm in contemporary bioethics. We will also examine some of the most successful anthropological theories of non-human agency—Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, Alfred Gell’s anthropology of art and Carlo Severi’s ritual action theory—as well as the emerging paradigms of perspectivism and multinaturalism in Amazonian (Viveiros de Castro) and Andean anthropology (Marisol de la Cadena). Readings might also include important books redefining the very notion of (inert) landscapes, such as Julie Cruikshank’s Do Glaciers Listen? and Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think. Finally, we will consider the implications and limits of the recent trend of granting legal personhood to rivers and landscapes in Colombia, India, and New Zealand.

The workshop will meet four times in Fall 2024 (Oct 2, 16, 30, Nov 13) and Winter 2025 (Jan 8, 22, Feb 5, 19), and twice during the Spring 2025, including a guest lecture (details TBA). 

 

HUM 270/PHIL 221: Topics in Epistemology 

Instructor: Annalisa Coliva

Will address topics such as 1. the rejection of individualistic epistemology; 2. The nature of common sense and common knowledge; 3. Testimony and trust; 4. Deep disagreements and the genealogical challenge to the good standing of our philosophical, moral and religious convictions; 5. "I am a woman/man" - how family resemblance, the first-personal authority of avowals and hinge epistemology can make sense of gender self-determination

 

HUM 270/EURO ST 200B: On Resistance

Instructor: Kai Evers

Recent theories of resistance direct their critique, even scorn, at Hannah Arendt’s concept of politics, foremost her analysis totalitarianism and theory of total domination (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951). Judith Butler criticized Arendt for defining politics “restrictively as an active stance” arguing that such a narrow definition excludes central aspects of the political from the discussion, in particular passive forms of resistance. Howard Caygill and Iris Därmann hold Arendt’s theory of total domination responsible for past disinterest and current misconceptions of resistance. Butler, Caygill and Därmann, among others, advocate for more inclusive approaches to resistance. Resistance studies should develop concepts and theories that take serious forms of resistance which avoid open confrontation, that make efforts to sustain life (Butler), take measures to preserve the capacity to resist (Caygill), that pay attention to „flat“ forms of resistance, as Därmann calls them. The course examines central theoretical, literary and historical writings (and films) on resistance-- Clausewitz, Nietzsche, Freud, Ghandi, Arendt, Fanon, Pasolini, Weiss, among them. These readings will be engaged in critical dialog with recent proposals to revise our definitions and practices of resistance (Caygill, Butler, Malm, Därmann, and others).

 

HUM 270/EAS 220: Urban Ecology

Instructor: Jon Pitt

This seminar focuses on Tokyo as a case study for "urban ecology" and examines various media forms that look to document the complex entanglements of Japan's metropolis. We will read works from infrastructure studies, architectural history, critical plant studies, and ecocriticism more broadly alongside works of modern and contemporary Japanese literature and cinema to question what kinds of emergent ecologies can be found among the rubble and ever-changing landscape of modern Tokyo.

 

HUM 270/COM LIT 210: Law in Theory

Instructor: Liron Mor

The law is a key organizing principle of our social existence, whose meaning and inevitability are often taken for granted. But what is "law"? How and when did it come into being and in what contexts? Is the law universal or does it operate differentially? What is its relationship to violence and in what ways might it be generative? Do its modes of operation change in the age of algorithms and preemption? And are there other historical normative orders or conceivablesocial frameworks beyond the juridical? In considering these and related questions, this seminar will explore the ways in which "the juridical" structures notonly what is commonly regarded as the political sphere -- the state, sovereignty, international relations -- but also many other, supposedly unrelated, spheres of life that shape the fundamental coordinates of subjectivity itself, such as signification, space-time, identity, and even humor. Looking at various geographic contexts and stressing the colonial legacies of the law, we will investigate principal juridico-political concepts, procedures, and institutions, such as the  social contract, international law, human rights and weaponized humanitarianism, property law and liberal "possessive individualism," the state of exception and the role of the juridical in imperial, colonial, and racializing projects. Readings may include works by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Sigmund Freud, Alenka Zupancic, Saidiya Hartman, Samera Esmeir, Brenna Bhandar, Nasser Mufti, Timothy Mitchell, Eyal Weizman, Evgeny Pashukanis, Cedric Robinson, and Robert Knox. The final paper for this class will consist in a close, critical reading of a  significant recent legal case of your choosing and its analysis in light of class readings and discussions.

 

HUM 270/ANTHRO 289: Multimodal Anthropology

Instructor: Roxanne Varzi

Course description forthcoming.

 

 

 

Winter 2025

HUM 270/ART 215: Antigone Effect: Thresholds of Resistance in Three Acts

Instructor: Juli Carson

As Jacques Lacan mused in Seminar VII on Ethics: “Is there anyone who doesn’t evoke Antigone whenever there is a question of a law that causes conflict in us even though it is acknowledged by the community to be a just law?”  60 years later, it’s still a good question. For the year 2020 has at once returned to us the 1918 pandemic, the 1929 depression, and the 1968 cultural revolution. Concomitantly, a slate of reactionary governments – both symptom and cause of these crises – are initiating unethical policies at the precipice of International Law.  Against this backdrop, The Antigone Effect presents a genealogy of poignant, and yet paradoxical, strategies of resistance against perceived unjust laws. Act one gives us Sophocles’ Antigone, a tragic heroine who initiates her own demise in defiance of the King-Father’s command against her brother. Within modernity, it’s the paradoxical nature of Creon’s law – one that puts state over family, law over family, and ultimately, a monarch’s will over that of the Gods – that Hölderin, Marx, Freud, and Brecht famously toiled over in the Romantic and Left periods. So too did Lacan, Kristeva and Derrida, in the French psychoanalytical context, and Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek more recently in the cultural theory context. Act two gives us Alexander Kluge’s omnibus film, “Germany in Autumn.” Produced in 1977, it was real-time response to the kidnapping and murder of a prominent industrialist by political terrorists motivated by the “counter-violence” tactics of the Baader Meinhof gang. One of the film’s fictional sections entitled “Antigone Displaced” – produced by filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff and novelist Heinrich Böll – makes a direct connection between the ancient myth and those events that have simply become known as “The German Autumn.” Act Three entitled “Protest (art) in the age of digital manipulation,” completes the genealogy with a critical question about the current political inversion that has globally occurred: What happens when heads of state evoke, in themselves, both monarch and stochastic terrorist, while the people remain the embodiment of a fraying democratic system of law? How might artists and activists, in turn, provide a non-violent tactical means of resistance in a world where history, science and political consciousness are prone to nefarious digital manipulation by authoritarian populists?  The Antigone Effect addresses those artists, writers, filmmakers and digital producers whose work diligently consider this dilemma.  

 

HUM 270: Jacques Lacan X-XI

Instructor: Horacio Legras

This seminar will focus on an intensive reading of two pivotal seminars in Jacques Lacan's work: Seminar X, where he clarifies the concept of anxiety as a central affect in psychoanalysis and explores the role of the objet a in relation to and beyond this affect; and Seminar XI, the first of his seminars to be widely accessible to an English-speaking audience. Seminar XI introduces new developments concerning the gaze and marks the beginning of Lacan's exploration of the "real" unconscious—an unconscious no longer structured as language—that will dominate his work in the 1970s. We will begin with an overview of Lacan's work leading up to Seminar X and then engage in a participatory discussion of the key ideas presented in these two seminars

 

HUM 270/EUR 200A: Understanding Political Violence

Instructor: David Pan

While violence has always been used in war as a way to subjugate an enemy, both terrorism and totalitarian violence seem to have arisen in the modern period with different motivations that distinguish them from war. Considering examples such as the French Revolution, Nazi Germany, and communist revolution, this course will differentiate different forms of political violence, analyze their motivations, and determine the conditions under which violence can come to dominate political life. Readings will include texts by Robespierre, Sorel, Benjamin, Schmitt, Bataille, Fanon, and Arendt.

 

Spring 2025

HUM 270/PLSC 239: Insurgencies

Instructor: Kevin Olson

This is the era of MAGA, the “So-Called Islamic State,” Anonymous, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, anti-austerity protests in Europe, pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, Iran-sponsored militant groups, and on and on. These uprisings pose important issues of political critique. They force us to ask how insurgent movements create new forms of homegrown criticism, assert claims, form new and subaltern public spheres, politicize issues, and position themselves within fields of power. The dynamic movements of today pose such questions particularly in the domains of discourse, performativity, and practice. These issues are vital to an understanding of revolutions, “foundings,” postcolonialism, and subaltern politics. Insurgencies are also important for the critical mirror they hold up to our own thinking.  They probe the ways we conceptualize and value different forms of the political.  We tend to equate political insurgency with raw, unvarnished political action and the “will of the people,” attributing it a kind of sanctity and rectitude.  Tensions result, however, when those grassroots movements turn out to be communist, Islamic, or genocidal.  In a self-critical mode, we must ask why such moments of political upheaval capture our imagination. How do they become paradigmatic of the political in general, and what does this imply about our understanding of politics?  With Foucault and David Scott, we must also ask whether we indulge in a kind of romanticism when we “cut off the head of the King” and privilege insurgent
politics. This seminar is designed to probe such issues through the lens of critical theory.  With an eye towards graduate research design, we will also address important interpretive issues in the study of insurgent politics.  These include questions about the archival, ethnographic, and epistemic bases of studying subaltern political movements.  We will ask how we can navigate issues of power in the construction and interpretation of the archive, particularly problems of archival erasure and silence.  We will examine ways in which critique can become self-reflexive about its own assertion of epistemic authority, including misappropriating, over-romanticizing, or misreading these “othered” political movements. Readings will be drawn from: Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, revised ed.  Intro by Jonathan Schell.  Penguin Classics, 1967. Ariella Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. Verso, 2019. Banu Bargu, Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons. Columbia University Press, 2014. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly.  Harvard University Press, 2015.  

 

HUM 270/HIST 250: Colonial (Dis)order: Race & Gender in Latin America

Instructor: Rachel O'Toole

How was colonial order simultaneously regulated and destabilized through race, gender, sex, class, and ethnicity? This course considers the mechanisms of colonial order in sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century Latin America alongside insurgencies, evasions, and refusals of Iberian, French, and British colonialism and slavery. We will explore how colonial authorities, ecclesiastical officials, and transatlantic merchants coopted Indigenous leadership, regulated sex roles, and trafficked Black people for profit to illuminate interwoven structures of early modern capitalism and modern state surveillance. Concurrently, we will ask: if the colonial state was extractive, then how did Andean laborers and Mexica vendors make the market their own? If conquering white patriarchs envisioned pious households, which
of their daughters could challenge masculine impositions of honor? If Catholic clerics demanded conversion, how and where did Atlantic Africans imagine a new Christianity and hijack Church archives? 

 

HUM 270/COMP LIT 210: Political Theology & Race

Instructor: J. Kameron Carter

This course represents a black studies/black critical theory engagement with political theology that
aims to unsettle standard approaches to this idea. Specifically, by understanding the convergence of
the political and the theological (or the religion-secular couplet) as a function of racial capitalism,
this course dislodges political theology from a strictly Eurocentric setting. It relocates it within the
general history of Western imperiality. This is a history that, in large part, operates through the
difference Christianity constructs as an antagonism between Jews and Arabs-Muslims that further
mutates through the rise of racial-colonial capitalism into the difference a Euro-North Atlantic West
imposes between and within those racialized as Semites (Jews and Arab-Muslims), on one hand, and
those colonized-racialized-enslaved as Blacks, Savages, Natives, etc., on the other.
In short, this course explores a new framework for understanding settler colonialism, racial
capitalism, the return of repressed fascism/authoritarianism, the rise in nationalism/populisms,
compromised democracy, and, finally, the issue of Israel/Palestine/Zionism as functions of political
theology.

 

HUM 270/Visual Studies 295: Power at Hand: Theories of Material Culture, Assemblage and Power

Instructor: Matthew Canepa

“The thing is the person and the person is the thing.” (Tilley, “Objectification”). The theoretical armature behind this seminar draws from conversations in the social sciences and the humanities, ranging from Heidigger to Pierre Bourdeiu, to more recent debates such as Object Oriented Ontologies, New Materialisms, and theories of assemblage and entanglement arising from Deleuze and Guattari that interrogate the relationship of humans and things and, especially in relationship to the types of objects we are dealing with here, those with an intersection with power. While the emphasis of this seminar will center on archaeological theory and the above related theorist, in a portion of it, we will think through these problems from other perspectives, like, for example, Robin Berstein's "scripture things" to analyze ways in which human subjectivities are shaped through everyday physical engagement with the material world. She considered the ways in which things prompt, structure, or choreograph behavior. She did so the context of the post-Civil War American South and had recourse to a much more textured archive of objects, ranging from kitsch to children’s toys as well as mass media. The material I will use as examples draw from ancient Western Asian elite luxury material but are equally challenging when it comes to disentangling their role disciplining and quite literally crafting politically useful human identities. Not a cohesive school of thought, but rather a collection of broader overlapping debates, this range of approaches focus on the notion that objects, or perhaps better “things” (tools, buildings, art objects and, in this case, dining implements), landscapes and, in the case of Post-Human or New Materialist approaches, even climactic events and atomic structures can have effects on human behavior and social processes that are somewhat or even largely independent of human intentions. This range of approaches focus on the mutually entangled or even co-constitutive role of humans, objects of human manufacture, technologies, and human societies with the agentive role of objects, spaces, or landscapes, tethered tightly or loosely to that of human creators, patrons, users or viewers.