We’ll read excerpts from Judith Butler’s most recent book, Dispossession, along with the chapter in Precarious Life on indefinite detention and the question of what constitutes the human.

The second half of the meeting will be a casual colloquium and closing reception. We’ll debrief and decide what the future will hold.

For the last three years, ARC has explored a variety of time-based art practices from different disciplinary and regional perspectives. We have considered time-based practice in relation to the formal legacies of visual, performance, and cinematic forms. We have focused on places where experimental artists and curators learn from and revise each other, as well as the blindspots that still exist amongst contemporary circles of sculptural, choreographic, theatrical, musical, photographic, video, and installation art practice.

If, as is sometimes held, Wittgenstein wrote as if he had read nothing, while Heidegger wrote as if had read everything, then the common opinion about Richard Rorty is that he wrote as if he had misread everybody.

In my talk, I will show that this opinion, while not entirely unjustified, needs to be nuanced by a recognition that in his work, Rorty in fact endorsed, theorized, and employed several different types of reading.

Rei Terada is a professor in the Comparative Literature Department at UC-Irvine. Her book Feeling in Theory was the recipient of the 2001 René Wellek Prize of the Comparative Literature Association. In her most recent book-length work, entitled Looking Away, Terada revisits debates about appearance and reality in order to make a startling claim: that the purpose of such debates is to police feelings of dissatisfaction with the given world. Focusing on romantic and post-romantic thought after Kant, Terada argues that acceptance of the world “as is” is coerced by canonical epistemology and aesthetics.

Silvia Federici is an autonomous feminist Marxist who was active in the wages for housework movement. Her scholarship has offered a feminist critique both of perhaps more often read theorists of post-Fordism as well as central concepts in Marx, including primitive accumulation. We’ll think about reproductive labor and care work as we read a short interview, “On Capitalism, Colonialism, and Food Politics” and longer excerpts from Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle.

Gary Ruchwarger is a UC Berkley alumnus, journalist and author who’s lived for some time in Estelí, Nicaragua. He will read from his forthcoming memoir, Angels and Amnesia: The Extraordinary Memoirs of a North American Jew in Nicaragua. The reading and discussion will trace the influence on his thought, and then on his Nicaragua-based journalism and related writings, of three key members of the Frankfurt School: Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin.

A workshop session devoted to Italian autonomous Marxists, who have spent time trying to account for changes in post-industrial economies. We’ll try to understand how the “multitude” is spoken about; what immaterial and cognitive labor are; and how amidst all these transformations, art, too, has transformed.

Readings: Antonio Negri, “Art and Immaterial Labour” (pages 101-123) and Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude (Days Two and Four).

As a way of making a foray into understanding some of the obscure processes of finance capital—securitized debt, derivatives, the shadowbanking institution—we’ll read the beginning of short book by Christian Marazzi called “The Violence of Financial Capitalism,” which will prepare us for the discussion and lecture with Professor Meister.

Robert Meister is a professor in the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz and is the Executive Director of the Bruce Initiative project entitled Re-thinking Capitalism.

The paper works at the intersection of two concepts, objects and fetishes, focusing on objects invested by psychological, erotic, emotional, symbolic values, that transform them into fetishes; and aims at showing that there is a profound parallelism between fetishism and artistic creativity: both infinitize details, mirroring macrocosm in microcosm. By this way the negative connotation still linked to the concept of fetish is totally questioned and subverted.

In my paper I will argue that Hegel’s phenomenology contains a series of theories of intentionality that all fail for different reasons. In particular, I will closely look on a famous sub-chapter of the analysis of self-consciousness. This chapter has been the object of highly influential readings from the Marxist tradition to Sartre, psychoanalysis, and the Frankfurt School. However, the paper argues that these readings miss the essential structure of the chapter and are unable to account for the arguments presented.

Theodor W. Adorno is known for his deeply negative views of the modern world. According to him, the evils of modernity (such as the Shoa) have not been accidental to the way we structure our lives and think about the world around us. Rather, these evils have been intimately connected with the modern society and rationality. Although Adorno offers no hope for a definite remedy, he places his trust in doing philosophy, and he does philosophy in form of uncompromising critique, both of modern society and of the dominant traditions of thought within it.

For a long time critical theorists have reproduced the thesis that culture, industrially produced, loses the element of critical negativity hidden in its bourgeois affirmative character. Instead of freeing the masses, the culture industry delivers mere deception, and cinema is treated as the central sector of that swindle. But it is important to realize that Adorno, the main representative of this thesis, adopts several contradictory positions about cinema.

The Berkeley Human Rights Seminar invites distinguished scholars across disciplines to present their recent research on human rights. Hosting several lectures and a book roundtable each semester, the seminar brings these scholars into conversation with the Berkeley community. The theme for the 2012 -13 seminar lectures is “The Recent History of Human Rights.”

This seminar features Michael Rosen (Harvard), discussing his book, Dignity: Its History and Meaning (Harvard 2012)

The Darstellungsproblem – how can something (a thing, an idea, an experience or whatever) that exists (or is thought of) in one medium be expressed or represented in another one that is different from it? – is a distinctive philosophical problem that is of central importance for German Idealism and much subsequent philosophy in the continental tradition. Whether you agree with the Idealists’ solutions to it or not, awareness of the problem, I believe, enriches our understanding both historically and substantively. (Rosen)