Past Courses in the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory

Required Courses

Spring 2009

Critical Theory 200, The Force of Critique: Kant and Marx
Pheng Cheah

'Critique' is commonly taken as an intellectual or theoretical activity. This course explores the original connection between critique, causality and practical force in the writings of Kant and Marx. We will begin by examining Kant's assertion of the primacy of practical philosophy and his understanding of moral freedom as the causality of ideas in the 2nd Critique before exploring in more detail the importance of the power of aesthetic judgment in the architectonic of Kant's critical philosophy. We will then consider Marx's materialist critique of the idealist understanding of freedom and its connection to the aesthetic and spiritual realm and his understanding of the revolutionary force of critique. If time permits, we will look at how the Frankfurt School attempts to redeem aesthetics by reconnecting it to revolutionary force. No prior knowledge of these authors will be assumed.

Texts to be studied include:

Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1999)
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2001)
Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992)
Karl Marx, The German Ideology, trans. C. J. Arthur (International Publishers)
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)

Fall 2008

Critical Theory 205, Fall 2008
Critical Aesthetic Theory

The aims of this seminar are several fold: to track the ways in which the goals of "critical theory" were from its earliest days associated with the project of an aesthetic critique; to assess the degree to which critical theory was (or was not) consistent with the major texts of Western aesthetics (Kant, Hegel, etc.); and finally to engage and evaluate the "return" of aesthetics since the 1970's in light of cultural conceptual challenges to the paradigm of Western Marxism. We will devote special attention to the problem of reflective judgment, to the nature and limits of materialism, and to the ongoing negotiations between romanticism and modernism, including postmodernism.

During the semester we will read some of the "founding" texts of modern Western aesthetics in detail, but the course will be construed as an investigation of the relationships between critical theory and aesthetics rather than as an introduction to or survey of the philosophy or theory of art.

We will work collaboratively as much as possible. Students will be responsible for leading one class meeting in an informal way. Papers treating some question raised directly by the materials read and discussed in the course will be due as follows: paper topics submitted for review and approval by November 5; final papers due in both electronic and hard copy by December 10. Papers submitted after December 10 will be read as they are received but grades will be recorded as "I".

In addition to the following books (on order), there will be a selection of readings from works by Hume, Habermas, Marx and Engels, Walter Benjamin, Terry Eagleton, Jay Bernstein, and Fredric Jameson.

Required Books

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment
Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind
Hegel, Introductory Lectures
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy
Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

Critical Theory 240, Fall 2008
Research Seminar: Ecocriticism Meets Biopolitics Anne-Lise François

This research seminar addresses two areas of literary and critical theory concerned with animal/human divides and the relationship between place, language and politics.  "Biopolitics" commonly refers to the politicization of those areas of life that the human shares with other animals, and to the interest the modern state takes in "making live" and in the regulation and rendering productive of life functions--through statistics on population, sexual habits, health, sanitation, etc. "Ecocriticism" usually designates the study of literature in relation to something called "nature," and is often defined by narratives of human destructiveness, difference and lost connection. What insights can these two fields bring to bear on one another and what role does the study of literature and linguistic experience play in either? How and why has the ethical turn toward nonhuman others--evident in the emerging field of animal studies--coincided with the industrialization of food production and modern consumerism?  Other topics will include: the conflict between "modernity" and "modernization" and the role of marginalized communities; agriculture as a border-space between "culture" and "nature"; fantasies about ecological disaster, social catastrophe, and science's (or poetry's) ability to save or destroy humankind.

Readings by: David Abram, Adorno & Horkheimer, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Jonathan Bate, John Berger, Lawrence Buell, Judith Butler, Mike Davis, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Geoffrey Hartman, Vicki Hearne, Martin Heidegger, Fredric Jameson, Franz Kafka, Naomi Klein, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, Michael Pollan, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gary Snyder, Raymond Williams, Cary Wolfe.

Book list:
Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals

Films:
Ridley Scott, Bladerunner
Herzog, Grizzly Man

Electives

Spring 2009

Comparative Literature C221
Rhetoric 221
Marxian Aesthetics, Literary Theory & Criticism: Some Classic Texts
Robert Kaufman

Tuesday 2-5PM , 233 Dwinelle

Though Marxian theory will inevitably be one of its chief concerns, this seminar will not be primarily a course in Marxian theory's relations to aesthetics, literary theory, and/or criticism--much less a course in Marxian theory itself. Rather, the seminar will reconsider in a very sustained manner some classic, highly influential texts within Marxian thought that virtually take for granted--or at least take extraordinarily seriously--the existence, and the importance to cognition (and therefore to critical thought and agency), of a distinct mode of human experience and activity known as aesthetic (with a particularly crucial version of aesthetic experience being found in the literary). The classic texts we'll read will likely include writings by Kant, Hegel, Marx and Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Lukács, Korsch, Brecht, Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Sartre, Beauvoir, Williams, and Jameson

Film Studies 240
Toward a Critical Theory of Media: The Frankfurt School and Film
Tony Kaes

Tuesday 2-5PM, 226 Dwinelle

This seminar will focus on the critical writings on film and photography by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Theodor W. Adorno in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. We shall engage in close readings of both classical and lesser-known texts, as well as complicate our readings with pertinent examples from film history. We will try to contextualize their arguments by relating them to the contemporaneous theories of Georg Simmel, Bert Brecht, Ernst Jünger, Sergei Eisenstein, et al. We shall also study the influence and legacy of critical media theory in Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Kluge, and Harun Farocki. All texts are in English translation.

History 280
Reason and History in Modern European Thought
Martin Jay

Monday 2-4P, 3104 Dwinelle

This seminar will examine the vexed history of the concept of “reason” and the no less vexed attempts to realize reason in history promoted by European thinkers in the past three centuries. Critiques of reason and defenses of its “other” will also be examined. We will look at writings by Kant, Hegel, Weber, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, Oakeshott, Habermas and Sloterdijk.

Sociology 202B
Practice And Symbolic Power In Pierre Bourdieu
Loic Wacquant

Spring 2008

Italian Studies 204, Contemporary Trends in Critical Theory
Desire, Pleasure, Enjoyment, and Their Politics
Alessia Ricciardi

This course examines the genealogy and value of the libidinal vocabulary within some of the most urgent debates occurring at the contemporary intersection of political and psychoanalytic thought.

We will start by exploring Freud's and Lacan's respective theories of desire, examining in detail the constitutive relationship of desire to loss/lack. We will continue by considering Deleuze and Guattari's response to these psychoanalytic theories in A Thousand Plateaus. We will discuss their notion of a productive desire, which has proved to be widely influential on other theorists from Hardt and Negri to Braidotti. In considering the metamorphosis and political transformations of the concept of desire, we will examine the drift of desire toward love in its Spinozist and Christian resonances, as articulated by Negri in his essay "Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo."

Next, we will analyze the notion of pleasure in Foucault's late work, particularly as elaborated in the second volume of his History of Sexuality. Why does Foucault deliberately abandon the vocabulary of desire in favor of one centered on pleasure? What are the political and biopolitical consequences of his choice?

At the end of the course, we will consider the emergence of enjoyment as a necessary concept in Lacan's later works, including a selection of Seminars VII and XVII, in order to assess his discussion of capitalism as the political organization of enjoyment.

Works by Freud, Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Negri, and Braidotti. The course will be taught seminar-style.

 

Fall 2007

Ethics and Aesthetics in Nietzsche
Judith Butler, T.J. Clark

This seminar will examine Nietzsche's account of decaying systems of morality and his thoughts about possible futures.  Key texts will be On the Genealogy of Morals and The Will to Power. In addition we shall explore Nietzsche's changing conception of the aesthetic dimension in human life -- not just Nietzsche's evolving views on art, but his notion of the aesthetic as a specific and pervasive form of human practice and self-understanding problematically entwined with ethics and the life of consciousness.   We will make some reference to The Birth of Tragedy  (and Nietzsche's grounds for repudiating that early work),  and consider what role Nietzsche reserved for art and aesthetics when prevailing norms of truth seemed no longer credible.  We will think about Nietzsche's own work and what possibilities it opened up for  artworks of the early 20th century.  Did Nietzsche leave to the art of the earlier 20th century the question of what form art might take in an era when the test of Truth was no longer available?  Did the task of art  become to avoid, in such circumstances, either a glib acceptance of its "merely aesthetic" mission or its spurious self-elevation to religion or philosophy?  The case of Picasso will be relevant here, and will be considered (selectively!) with Nietzsche's ideas in mind.

 

Anthropology 250-05
Postcoloniality and the Quetsion of Difference
Saba Mahmood

This course centers around the question of difference as it has come to be conceptualized and debated in recent postcolonial literature produced on the non-Western world. The readings for this course aim not so much at geographical representation as at thematic exploration of how the problem of "Third World difference" has been conceptualized in a variety of disciplines. Postcolonial critique, when it first emerged, was largely focused around questions of colonialism and nationalism, particularly how one might understand and explore postcolonial modernity against dominant models based on the experience of Western European societies. In this earlier moment, the question of difference was primarily posed as one of distinction between the West and non-West, the power of the former to misrepresent the latter. In recent years, these earlier debates have yielded a new probelmatization of difference as a site of epistemological, political, and ethical struggle internal to postcolonial societies. While the condition of postcoloniality cannot be thought outside the epistemic and philosophical assumptions undergirding Western knowledge production today, this new scholarship has increasingly sought to explore forms of life whose historicities, temporalities and practices depart from modular forms of Western modernity. While in the first couple of weeks we will touch upon a few key texts from the earlier debate, majority of our time will be spent reading recent work that centers around the following themes: interventionist and representational modes of power; production of sexual difference and identity; techno-economic rationalities; criminality, politics, and affect.