Judith Butler, Maxine Elliott Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley
Eric Fassin, Professor of Sociology, Department of Political Science and Department of Gender Studies, Paris-8 University
Michael Lucey, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley
Bruno Perreau, Cynthia L. Reed Professor, and Associate Professor of French Studies, MIT

This event will consider how gender studies and queer theory have been translated, received, appropriated, and refused in France, sparking debates about religion, nature, science, cultural imports, immigration, race, and national belonging.

If the transition from Kant to Hegel is the move from philosophy to theory, as Cole has argued elsewhere, then it’s worth finding out what, if anything, in Kant makes this transition possible in the positive sense—what in the three critiques and other Kantian writings enables the kind of exposition we find in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit? Cole will suggest that Kant is, strangely enough, the best argument for dialectics today.

Mel Chen’s path-breaking 2012 book Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect opened up entirely new fields of inquiry at the intersection of queer theory, animal studies, critical race theory, and new materialisms. In this session, we explore the line of thinking leading from animacy towards Professor Chen’s more recent research on the materialities of “constitution” and the co-imbrication of race and disability. What do ideas of animacy—and animality—tell us about human vulnerability and the futures our politics make for us?

What future(s) do animals have in and beyond life? In this session, Professor Donna Jones presents her reading of time and the technologization of animal being in Ridley Scott’s landmark 1982 film Blade Runner before opening the conversation up to broader posthumanist questions. This is also an opportunity to examine one of the most persistent modes of thinking about futurity: the speculative. How have our speculative fictions about human and animal being—and human and animal politics—helped to inaugurate our world?

Feminist theory has generally been on the side of non-violence, yet few would contest the idea that self-defense sometimes does require force, if not violence. And yet, there are spurious invocations of self-defense that populate our legal and political world. Are there ethical and political distinctions to be made between aggression, force, and violence? How should we think about the relationship between violence in the world and in the mind? Can we decide any of these matters outside of a critical analysis of discourse and context?

Feminism rightly sees one of its most important tasks as the exposure of, and struggle against, violence towards women. In the twenty first century this violence shows no sign of decreasing. In this lecture, Jacqueline Rose will argue that because the discourse on violence has tended to be appropriated by radical feminist thinking – violence is not only, but also exclusively, what men do to women – the question of violence, as part of psychic reality, has become something that feminism repudiates.

Bruno Bosteels, Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University, is the author of several books, including The Actuality of Communism (Verso, 2011); and Marx and Freud in Latin America (Verso, 2012). His research interests include the crossovers between art, literature, and theory; the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s; decadence, dandyism and anarchy at the turn between the 19th and 20th centuries; cultural studies and critical theory; and the reception of Marx and Freud in Latin America.

The conference aims to explore Freud’s place in current debates on secularism and post-secularism, featuring new research on the intersections of theology, Judaism and history in Freud’s psychoanalytic theories.

The conference aims to explore Freud’s place in current debates on secularism and post-secularism, featuring new research on the intersections of theology, Judaism and history in Freud’s psychoanalytic theories.

Authority is an antinomian concept for Theodor W. Adorno; by asserting itself, it often appeals to norms, values, or metaphysical notions that prove to be ideological or repressive; in contrast, true autonomous authority aims precisely at a liberation from them. Adorno claims that the “authoritarian personality” expresses the “ontological need” to abide by metaphysical truths and universal laws; the argument joins Adorno’s critique of existentialist phenomenology to his views on social history.

In this first session of the Animal Futures Working Group, Joshua Williams explores a recent groundswell in North American and European visual and performance art that attempts to rehabilitate and repurpose the universalist scopic regime of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century natural history. The project of these new naturalist artists is not to ritually declaim their own animality, as others have in the past, but rather to hold their fellow animals at a distance in order to disclaim their own entanglement in hegemonic structures of taxonomy and control.

Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality as described in Security, Territory, Population is entirely West European. What would a genealogy of modern state practices look like in a former colonial country in Asia?

Looking at India, one finds that early governmental practices, including those of rational bureaucracy, rule of law and the knowledge of populations, were motivated mainly by raison d’État: it was the creation and maintenance of the sovereign power of British colonial authority that was the objective.

Critical Theory presents a seminar with Tom Kuhn. To receive advance readings, please contact critical_theory@berkeley.edu.

Tom Kuhn’s main research interests are in political literature in the 20th century. He has worked particularly on Bertolt Brecht, and is the series editor of the main English-language edition of Brecht’s works. In addition, he has written on exile and anti-fascist literature, and on more recent drama.

Having started his career as something of a cultural pirate, Brecht later embarked upon a more serious engagement with a wide range of both ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ cultures. This interest was variously motivated, by his literary ambition and also by his (internationalist) politics. He became interested in translation and cultural mediation. If we look again at his own work through these aspects – I shall be considering some poems and The Caucasian Chalk Circle – we discover, especially in his American years (1941-47), an extraordinarily wide-roaming work that can be read, in the midst of the Second World War, as a reflection on the condition of existing within or between the cultures.

The period 1780-1830 is clearly important to Rancière’s thought, as opening up a thought of emancipation and a concept of modernity however qualified, new political and aesthetic horizons together. Yet it is clear that, whilst he never comprehensively gives up on modernity, in Rancière’s understanding of its later phases, it is problematic, repeatedly subject to drag, delay, obstruction, resistance and interference. This paper will ask three questions: firstly, how far does Rancière trace the predicament of modernity back to 1780-1830 itself, how far does he see it as deeply rooted in and forecast by its own paradoxical beginnings?

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics is a two-day conference featuring lectures and panels on neoliberalism and biopolitics by major thinkers currently working to develop and problematize these two concepts. As both objects of study and frames for analysis, neoliberalism and biopolitics have served as key ciphers over the past two decades for those attempting to appreciate the novelty of contemporary political rationalities, forms of social control, technological developments, and economic orders. Michel Foucault’s 1978-79 Collège de France lectures famously linked biopolitics and neoliberalism at both the historical and conceptual level; contemporary usage of both terms, however, extends well beyond Foucault’s original articulation.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics is a two-day conference featuring lectures and panels on neoliberalism and biopolitics by major thinkers currently working to develop and problematize these two concepts. As both objects of study and frames for analysis, neoliberalism and biopolitics have served as key ciphers over the past two decades for those attempting to appreciate the novelty of contemporary political rationalities, forms of social control, technological developments, and economic orders. Michel Foucault’s 1978-79 Collège de France lectures famously linked biopolitics and neoliberalism at both the historical and conceptual level; contemporary usage of both terms, however, extends well beyond Foucault’s original articulation.

Join The Program in Critical Theory’s faculty and students for a panel discussion and Q&A about the Designated Emphasis (DE) in Critical Theory. UC Berkeley Ph.D. students interested in applying to the DE are invited to attend. Refreshments and informal social to follow.

The Program in Critical Theory’s DE enables graduate students already enrolled in UC Berkeley Ph.D. programs from across the social sciences, arts, and humanities to obtain certification of a Designated-Emphasis specialization in Critical Theory.

Investigating the role of neoliberalism and biopolitics as both contemporary objects of study and paradigms of analysis for humanistic and social- scientific inquiry, the Graduate Student Symposium showcases student work focusing on topics related to the major themes of the Working Group series. Abstracts will be pre-circulated to provide orientation for the group discussion.

Where is the coveted, prophesied, dreaded crisis of capitalism? Why has the economic turmoil that has recently afflicted Western democracies generated relatively little social protest and rather faint attempts to replace the apparently moribund socio-economic model? The alleged crisis of capitalism, Albena Azmanova claims, has been a catalyst in the metamorphosis of neoliberal capitalism – a transmutation that began well before the recent economic meltdown and in many ways triggered it.