Abigail De Kosnik is Assistant Professor of Performance, Technology, & the Center for New Media, UC Berkeley. Prof. De Kosnik has two books forthcoming: The Survival of Soap Opera: Strategies for a New Media Era (essay collection, co- edited with Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington) and Illegitimate Media: Minority Discourse and the Censorship of Digital Remix Culture. She is also organizing a conference (currently scheduled for February 2010) on Open Source and the Humanities, sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media.

Greg Niemeyer is Associate Professor of Art Practice, Film, and the Center for New Media, UC Berkeley.

Idith Zertal is professor of Contemporary History and Senior Researcher at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Basel. She is the author of many books and articles on Jewish, Zionist and Israeli history. Her works include From Catastrophe to Power, Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel (1998); Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007 (co-authored with Akiva Eldar, 2007); and Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood which has been published since 2002 in eight languages.

Amy Huber is Assistant Professor of Literature at the Gallatin School at New York University. She is also a UC Berkeley Post-Doctoral Scholar and Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory for Fall 2010. Prof. Huber received her doctorate in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley in 2009. Her dissertation, “The General Theatre of Death,” is an interdisciplinary consideration of the pressures placed by 20th-century practices of total war on the narrative and visual forms of modernism.

Elsa Dorlin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Panthéon-Sorbonne University (Paris 1). She received her Ph.D in the History of Philosophy from Sorbonne University (Paris 4) in 2004. In 2009, she was awarded the Bronze Medal for research in philosophy by the CNRS (French National Center For Scientific Research). Her main field of research is the relation between body, violence and subjectivity in classical political theory, the historical epistemology of sex and race in medical thought and queer and feminist studies.

A seminar with Etienne Balibar on “Politics as War, War as Politics” and “Marxism and War.” The seminar participants should read the articles before the seminar.

Etienne Balibar was born in 1942. He graduated at the Sorbonne in Paris, later took his PhD from the University of Nijmegen (Netherlands). He is now Emeritus Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of Paris 10 Nanterre and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser) (1965), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (Verso, 1991, with Immanuel Wallerstein), Masses, Classes, Ideas (Routledge, 1994), The Philosophy of Marx (Verso 1995), Spinoza and Politics (Verso 1998), Politics and the Other Scene (Verso, 2002), and We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, 2004).

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and, since 2007, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She earned her PhD at the University of Munich, on literary space in the work of Dorothy M. Richardson’s novel Pilgrimage, as well as her habilitation, five years later. A specialist in the 19th and 20th century literature she has also written articles in the area of gender studies, psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and visual culture.

Prof. Evelyne Grossman will conduct a follow-up graduate seminar entitled “An Authentical Body of Sensibility,” a seminar on Artaud and Deleuze where she will talk about Artaud’s drawings and his transfigurations of “the human body.”

Many 20th century writers and philosophers have explored the painful modern experience of the destruction of “déliaison” between the psychic, linguistic, cultural, social, and political. Grossman uses the term “déliaison” in the sense of the negative processes which dissociate thought, opening it to other logical systems of rationality and creation.

The Department of Rhetoric and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies Present Samera Esmeir, Assistant Professor, Department of Rhetoric.

A former lawyer, Samera Esmeir received her Ph.D. in Law and Society from New York University. She works on the contemporary Middle East, specifically on questions of violence, war, and the security state.

A seminar for graduate students. If you wish to attend, please sign up in advance. Enrollment is limited to 20 students.

Howard Eiland has been involved since the late nineteen-eighties with the multi-volume Harvard University Press edition of the works of Walter Benjamin, an influential German writer who died in 1940 while in flight from the Nazis. He co-edited three volumes of Benjamin’s Selected Writings and co-translated Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and he has also translated Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 and his On Hashish. He is presently collaborating on a biography of Benjamin and preparing a translation of Benjamin’s early writings. He is a Lecturer in Literature at MIT.

Steven H. Shiffrin is Charles Frank Reavis, Sr. Professor of Law at the Cornell Law School. Professor Shiffrin is the author of Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America, Princeton University Press, 1999, and The First Amendment, Democracy, and Romance, Harvard Press, 1990, (winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Award). His writings have appeared in many publications, including the Harvard Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the UCLA Law Review, and the New York Times Book Review. His most recent book is The Religious Left and Church-State Relations, Princeton Press, 2009.

Professor Shiffrin will be introduced by Prof. Kathy Abrams (Law School) and Prof. Wendy Brown (Political Science) will offer a short response after his talk.

Steven H. Shiffrin is Charles Frank Reavis, Sr. Professor of Law at the Cornell Law School. Professor Shiffrin is the author of Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America, Princeton University Press, 1999, and The First Amendment, Democracy, and Romance, Harvard Press, 1990, (winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Award).

A seminar for graduate students. Please sign up in advance if you plan on attending this seminar. Enrollment is limited to 20 students.

W. J. T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media).

W. J. T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues.

A seminar for graduate students. Participation limited to twenty students.

J.M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He works primarily in the areas of aesthetics and the philosophy of art, ethics, critical theory, and German Idealism. Among his books are: The Philosophy of the Novel; The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno; Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics; Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting; he edited and wrote the introduction for Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics.

J.M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He works primarily in the areas of aesthetics and the philosophy of art, ethics, critical theory, and German Idealism. Among his books are: The Philosophy of the Novel; The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno; Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics; Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting; he edited and wrote the introduction for Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics.

World-renowned performance theorists Professors Hans-Thies Lehmann and Freddie Rokem visit UC Berkeley on March 9th to examine the often- fraught relationship between performance and philosophy as it plays out both on stage and in scholarship. With its emphasis on practice, embodiment, and presence, performance has often been the object of consternation for philosophers. Similarly, performance practitioners remain wary of the theoretical interpretations and the philosophical implications of their work. Yet, despite these seeming tensions, performance and philosophy remain entwined in a mutually reinforcing capacity.

Lecture by Gayatri Spivak presented by the Beatrice Bain Research Group Co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Rhetoric, the Department of Sociology, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies- Li Ka Shing, the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, the English Department, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Center for Race and Gender, the Center for South Asia Studies, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Department of Geography, and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory.

Respondents: Gayle Salamon (Assistant Professor of English, Princeton) Daniel Boyarin (Tauman Professor of Talmudic Culture, Departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric, UC Berkeley).

Ken Corbett is Assistant Professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He is the author of Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities (Yale University Press, 2009).

This talk argues for a queering of temporality that would undo nationally circumscribed and periodized fields of literary study in order to work through topoi–discursive commonplaces–that haunt texts across historical eras. My case study involves cynanthropy, the merger of human and dog; it takes as its starting point the Columbian New World encounter, from reports of dog-headed cannibals to accounts of the devouring dog as the ubiquitous companion/weapon of Spanish colonizers; and concludes with the attack of Diane Whipple by two Presa Canarios in San Francisco in 2001.

Professor Warner will be introduced by Wendy Brown (Political Science), and Saba Mahmood (Anthropology) will offer a short response after his talk.

Michael Warner is Seymour H. Knox Professor of English and American Studies at Yale, and chair of the department of English. His books include Publics and Counterpublics (2002); The Trouble with Normal (1999); and The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

A luncheon seminar for graduate students. Sandwiches and coffee will be provided.

As background reading for Professor Warner’s talk, “Sex & Secularity,” and for our seminar discussion, please try to read Max Weber, ‘Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions,’ AND Michael Warner, ‘Tongues Untied: Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood.’