December 2-3, 2016 MINOR JURISPRUDENCE IN HISTORICAL KEY Update: Symposium papers are now available. Visit the website to register and receive access to the papers. Conceptually, “minor jurisprudence” was an invention of the 1990s. It had two distinct incarnations. In 1994, Panu Minkkinen, then a research fellow at the University of Helsinki, published an intriguing […]

December 2-3, 2016 MINOR JURISPRUDENCE IN HISTORICAL KEY Conceptually, “minor jurisprudence” was an invention of the 1990s. It had two distinct incarnations. In 1994, Panu Minkkinen, then a research fellow at the University of Helsinki, published an intriguing essay entitled “The Radiance of Justice: On the Minor Jurisprudence of Franz Kafka,” in which he applied […]

For our third and final meeting, we will be discussing a chapter from Professor Keith Feldman’s forthcoming book Patterns of Life: Raciality, Visuality, Global War, which deals with “literary and visual configurations of the body in the long war on terror (roughly 1978 to the present).” In this meeting, Professor Feldman’s point of departure is […]

The objective of this symposium is to put into conversation many different kinds of analyses that have been produced in and/or re-elaborated in France and the U.S., in which gender is understood inseparably from its relations with many other relations of power, including racism, sexuality, class, capitalism, colonialism and coloniality. Program: 10:30-11: Introductory Remarks Stephane […]

A small, highly ornamented bed, now on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and acquired from a convent of religious women known as beguines, remains a mystery to art historians. Even more mysterious is a fifteenth-century limestone carving of the Nativity that, unlike other known devotional objects, features two beds for […]

This will be a forum with presentations from, and dialogue with, representatives from several social movements in Mexico: students from Ayotzinapa; mothers of disappeared students and young women; agricultural workers; members of the Teachers Union, and; activists involved with indigenous rights. The battles being fought against multifaceted forms of state violence in Mexico will be […]

This presentation outlines Walter Benjamin’s highly idiosyncratic conception of “revolution.” Despite its significance for his philosophical outlook, the concept of revolution receives no systematic or perhaps even consistent treatment in his heterogeneous writings. However, in contrast to the way the term is usually understood in political philosophy, Benjamin conceives of revolution primarily as a category of […]

DAY 2 “Futures of Intellectual History” is a graduate student conference that will serve as a platform for scholarly exchange in the subjects and methods of intellectual history. “Futures” first began as a conference at the Remarque Institute at New York University in 2015. The conference was a success, bringing together graduate students from around […]

DAY 1 “Futures of Intellectual History” is a graduate student conference that will serve as a platform for scholarly exchange in the subjects and methods of intellectual history. “Futures” first began as a conference at the Remarque Institute at New York University in 2015. The conference was a success, bringing together graduate students from around […]

Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning are often simply considered “whistleblowers” whose activities involved diffusing information. But, in fact, they are much more than that. They are the protagonists of a movement that is questioning the dispositives defining our present. Their very lives express something that must be heard: the advent of a new political subject. As […]

For our second meeting, we will be joined by Professors Suzanne Guerlac and Terrence Deacon to discuss the interdisciplinary resonances of the term “emergence” in relation to the thinking of life in the current moment. The Oxford English dictionary defines emergence as “The process of coming forth, issuing from concealment.” Starting here, moving through emergence’s […]

Panpsychism is a plausible theory of the fundamental nature of reality. It’s fully compatible with physics and with physicalism. Anyone who holds the following— I) physicalism is true, II) consciousness is real, III) there is no “radical emergence” — should at least endorse IV) psychism, the view that mind or consciousness is a fundamental feature of concrete reality, and […]

What can attention to dark matter, neutrinos in particular, elucidate about Blackpentecostal religious worlds? And what can attention to the noise making of Blackpentecostal adherents make more pronounced in the world of quantum physics? Building on the work in Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, this presentation attempts to think together what might seem to be disparate ways of thinking worlds known and unknown, the religious and the scientific, the noisy and the musical, with hopes of considering the epistemologies of quantum physics as Blackpentecostal.

This conference celebrates Martin Jay’s career as a professor of European intellectual history for forty-five years at UC Berkeley. All thirty-one speakers had him as their primary advisor for their doctoral study. Their work today demonstrates the breadth of Professor Jay’s impact beyond his own publications, within the academy and without. His former students work in universities […]

This conference celebrates Martin Jay’s career as a professor of European intellectual history for forty-five years at UC Berkeley. All thirty-one speakers had him as their primary advisor for their doctoral study. Their work today demonstrates the breadth of Professor Jay’s impact beyond his own publications, within the academy and without. His former students work in universities […]

In the Republic, Socrates argues that reason should rule over the whole soul because it has wisdom and foresight. And Aristotle endorsed this outlook in his conception of the happy life. But what could this claim possibly mean? Is it to be understood solely as part of an ancient psychology and ethical outlook? Or might it have […]

In this first session, we will be joined by the philosopher Frédéric Worms, who will discuss his recent work around the concept of a “critical vitalism.” Largely occulted in the wake of the Second World War, “vitalism” today connotes an unsettling rhetoric of power, virility, and domination, undergirded by an often mystical vital energy. Worms’ […]

Frédéric Worms is a philosopher and professor of contemporary philosophy and moral philosophy at the École normale supérieure française, where he also serves as Directeur-adjoint Lettres and director of the Centre International d’Etudes de la Philosophie Française. He is a member of the Comité consultatif national d’éthique. A specialist in the thought of Henri Bergson, his recent […]

Persistent misunderstandings divide postcolonial theory and French and francophone criticism. French criticism tends to view postcolonial theory as excessively general and, above all, as ideological. The textuality of post-colonial discourse, however, in the Foucauldian sense, suggests ways of bridging anglophone and francophone critical theory, which are actually closer than they at first appear. 

Nowhere outside of Germany has the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and others received such an enthusiastic and productive reception like in the United States. In the wake of the crisis of the New Left, the Frankfurt tradition became not just the door to a “hidden dimension,” as a volume […]

At the beginning of the 1980s, the rise of memory in the public sphere coincided with the crisis of Marxism, a current of thought that had deeply shaped the humanities of the previous decades. Consequently, Marxism did not contribute to the “memorial moment” characteristic of the turn of the twenty-first century. The Marxist vision of […]

Often defined as “presentism,” the regime of historicity of the beginning of the twenty-first century posits a kind of perpetual present, absorbing in itself both past and future. It corresponds with a neoliberal ethos that eternizes the current economic order and condemns any form of collective action. It avoids any critical elaboration of the past […]

Keynote Lecture, “Romanticism and Its Discontents” conference. For full conference program, visit https://nassrberkeley2016.wordpress.com. Presented by the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, with support from The Program in Critical Theory.

Keynote Lecture, “Romanticism and Its Discontents” conference. For full conference program, visit https://nassrberkeley2016.wordpress.com. Presented by the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, with support from The Program in Critical Theory.

As other species are snuffed out, possible futures for humans look bleak. Can radical political transformation bring an end to the sixth mass extinction event? As some charismatic creatures are being saved in zoos, captive breeding facilities, and cryogenic banks, a multitude of others are disappearing as they are disregarded or actively targeted for destruction. How should we love in a time of extinction? What practices of care can keep those who we love in the world? This talk focuses on two cutting edge responses to defaunation: rewilding and regenesis.

The unauthorised mass-movements of 2015, when more than a million people crossed maritime borders into European space, demonstrated more clearly than ever before that Europe’s deterrence politics had failed. The necropolitical obstacle course created by its border regime proved unable to prevent these disobedient mobilities. What we witness today, while often termed a ‘migrant or refugee crisis’, is in fact a crisis of the European project. Current processes of internal re-bordering along sovereign nation-state lines and logics significantly undermine Europe’s supposed post-national ethos and trans-border imaginary.

The intellectual affinities between Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin remain hitherto largely underexplored. The relation between both is a highly complicated one. While Simmel has testified, near the end of his life, that none of his students can be regarded as a true heir of his philosophy, Benjamin, for his part, is at various places in his work very critical about the work of his former teacher. Still, the distinction between “more life” and “more than life” that runs throughout Simmel’s philosophy of life is mirrored in Benjamin’s views on the opposition between nature and “construct”.

Jeffrey Sacks is Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature and the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Iterations of Loss: Mutilation and Aesthetic Form, al-Shidyaq to Darwish (Fordham University Press, 2015).

This event is organized by the Townsend Center Working Group on the History of Poetic Genre and co-sponsored by The Program in Critical Theory.

Rosi Braidotti (B.A. Hons. Australian National University, 1978; PhD, Université de Paris, Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1981; Honorary Degrees Helsinki, 2007 and Linkoping, 2013; Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA), 2009; Member of the Academia Europaea (MAE), 2014; Knighthood in the order of the Netherlands Lion, 2005) is Distinguished University Professor and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University.

Many believe that there is something wrong with anthropomorphizing animals. What exactly is wrong with it, for whom, and do the same problems hold—or not—when we zoomorphize humans? In this session, Professor Charis Thompson will addresses these questions through her work on elephants, bioterrorism, and the animal model in the life sciences. This is an opportunity to return to a set of questions that has preoccupied animal studies scholarship for decades: what exactly is the boundary between human and non-human animal life, and what does the varied terrain this boundary traverses tell us about our common future?

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1919), Freud introduces the death drive or destruction as an inherent tendency of human nature and an insurmountable force. However, for Freud, human nature is always bivalent; it is the location where the tension between opposing forces takes place, and where neither of the contrary forces can ever be fully present and dominant. The death drive is for the most part silent and only expresses itself in relationship in the life drive. Thus, human existence is an ongoing battle between life instincts\drives and impulses of destruction. Freud and Kant share one common supposition.

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. All 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.

This lecture explores how the Federal Constitution became a site of near unanimous public support in American life. I argue that the dominance and substantive meaning of constitutional veneration is actually a relatively recent development—the product of a series of interconnected political struggles between the American emergence onto the global stage with the Spanish-American War and World War I and the fallout of student and civil rights protest in the 1970s. In the process, the book raises a series of questions that have thus far been largely overlooked but that should be central to our conversations about the Constitution.

Sharing short excerpts from his recent book The Animal Claim, as well as a draft of a new essay, “Commodify,” Menely poses two questions. First, how should we understand the relation, conceptual and historical, between the limited forms of animal protection offered by statute law and the imperative of the free market to extract value from animals, between the modern extension of animal rights and the intensification of animal exploitation?

This presentation problematizes the effective weight of the ideal of freedom within the dynamics of modernity, in particular through a critical investigation of liberal and neoliberal discourses. Building on Foucault’s account of liberalism as an art of government, and by proposing an original typology of the ways in which common sense and theory question freedom, I show that the dynamics of modernity owes less to the continuous realization of the ideal of freedom than to the transformation of relations between practices mediated by institutions such as property, labor, law and political power.