Every day we are told that politics is a matter of having a voice, of being heard, of listening, or, more often, of failing to. But what is the significance of this aural metaphorics in contemporary political discourse? And why continue to put faith in the circuit of mouth to ear if it has shown […]

Why should we pursue a critical theory of democratic protest? Assuming that we should, what would such a critical theory look like today? My paper considers both questions, offering some partial answers. On my understanding, critical theory addresses normative questions relating to the good life for humans, to the kind of society that would enable […]

In our time of unprecedented instrumentalization and transformation of earthly and worldly processes, from the scale of the body to the planet, the Earth-Writing Symposium returns to the question of ‘geography’ as the praxis of ‘Earth-writing.’ Attention to the ‘graphia’ in ‘geography’ points us to a variety of forms of writing or inscription with, through […]

Throughout capitalism’s golden age, corporations identified success with sustained profitability, national governments obsessed about economic growth, and private citizens were expected to pursue their own interests, whether they perceived such a pursuit as an individual matter or the cement of class solidarity. With the ascendancy of financial institutions, however, a new order of priorities has […]

This is the 2018 Bernard Moses Memorial Lecture.  This annual event is part of the Graduate Council & Graduate Division Lectures. Recent hard right political mobilizations in the West are commonly framed as rebellions against neoliberalism. This lecture questions that framing as it identifies neoliberal reason with the aim to replace robust democracy and social […]

This talk is part of the Department of Rhetoric’s Fall Colloquium. It’s hot and it’s getting hotter. As the machinery of capital extraction, industrialism, and consumption refuses to relinquish its grip, temperatures continue to rise and chemical hot zones to spread. Tipping points threaten to alter the nature of what the ecologists of the 70s […]

Hegel on art as action and Arendt on action as public space converge. This convergence is not about what action, art and public space should be. It is about the historical transformations of the common condition—the symbolic order—as it relates to heterogeneity. Surprisingly, both Hegel and Arendt reveal a view of these transformations that is […]

“Emancipation of Memory: Experiments on Freedom and Democracy,” Susana Draper, Princeton University “State, Strike, Insurrection,” Bruno Bosteels, Columbia University 1968 in Mexico has always raised clashing images: of fierce state repression, of horizontal and inclusive forms of political mobilization. To think about 1968 we are offered October 2nd, the day of the student massacre, or […]

This seminar will take the International Feminist Strikes of 2017 and 2018 as its points of departure and will use the strike as a lens through which to analyze several key questions in contemporary feminist movements…

In Latin America, the meaning of neoliberalism remains contested, and debates on neoliberalism are ongoing. Complicating previous diagnoses, current feminist movements…

Verónica Gago is the author of…

This talk offers a history of “methodological individualism” (MI), tracing MI to its origins in marginal utility theory and describing its codification by microeconomics. Arguing that MI constituted a radically new theory of the individual subject in the social world, it attends to MI’s ideological coherence, suggesting that the rabid anti-socialism of microeconomic individualism in […]

Articulating and performing a mode of reading that responds to the challenges of the present…

A celebration of Professor Saba Mahmood’s life and work will take place on Monday, April 30 from 4:30PM – 7:00PM at the David Brower Center (2150 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94704). Please join friends and family in remembering Dr. Mahmood.

William Mazzarella will join us for a panel discussion and Q&A engagement with his recently published book, The Mana of Mass Society (Chicago, 2017). The session will begin with an introduction by Professor Stefania Pandolfo, followed by a brief introduction of the new book by Prof. Mazzarella. A panel of graduate students from the Department of Anthropology (Valerie […]

The working group’s final meeting is a culmination of sorts, intended to draw out the constellations we have been collaboratively building all along between the contested and shifting terrains of “the state”, “the global”, and “the public sphere” and the ways in which bodies are represented in (or not) and circulated through (or not) such […]

What makes a political theory a critical theory of politics? What critical theory of politics responds best to the particular challenges of our times? Drawing on a conception of critical theory indebted to the Frankfurt School tradition of theorizing, but integrating new impulses from outside it, I identify the salient features of a critical theory […]

The elision in ev’ry gestures in multiple ways: to the bodies that have been exempted in various iterations of sexuality studies, and to our quixotic desire to (re-)emplace them. It refers as well to the shifting and ever-proliferating fact of bodies: the way that apparent gaps may not represent incompleteness…

The elision in ev’ry gestures in multiple ways: to the bodies that have been exempted in various iterations of sexuality studies, and to our quixotic desire to (re-)emplace them. It refers as well to the shifting and ever-proliferating fact of bodies: the way that apparent gaps may not represent incompleteness…

The elision in ev’ry gestures in multiple ways: to the bodies that have been exempted in various iterations of sexuality studies, and to our quixotic desire to (re-)emplace them. It refers as well to the shifting and ever-proliferating fact of bodies: the way that apparent gaps may not represent incompleteness…

Presided and Moderated by: Professor Paola Bacchetta, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies; Co-chair, Project on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights, Center for Race & Gender, UC Berkeley Speaker Introduced by: Professor Angana Chatterji, Visiting Research Anthropologist and Co-chair, Project on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights, Center for Race and Gender, UC Berkeley […]

Introduction by Professor Susan Schweik, Department of English, UC Berkeley. Why does the citizenry of the United States so frequently represent the Mexican migrant as a would-be rapist, drug dealer, or murderer, and as the source of economic problems? This talk examines the representation of the threatening Mexican immigrant through the long history of constructing […]

While economics and aesthetics constitute discrete and irreconcilable forms of inquiry, the Italian context, 1949-73, offers a notable, vivid, even canonized (Arte Povera) exception. Through a reading of Piero Manzoni’s oeuvre, its influential aftermath, and its international reception, Mansoor demonstrates the degree to which first operaismo and then autonomia came to determine shifts in aesthetics […]

As the neoliberal crisis has brought about new conditions of vulnerability, precarity, and disposability, there is a resurgence of critical interest in the meeting points between queer theory and Marxism, two intellectual traditions that have previously been characterized as analytically distinct, historically successive, and even politically incompatible. While intellectual projects aimed at synthesizing these traditions […]

Please note the time change. In this second to the last meeting of the working group, we shift gears to consider more directly the relational practices involved in doing collaboration. We have seen the co-operative and the collective appear in various forms over the previous working group meetings: in the business + tech ideas of platform cooperativism discussed […]

The aim of this seminar is to assess whether the analytical tools of the past are adequate to identify and assess what we perceive as the revival of fascistic tendencies today. This is not to say that we are witnessing the re-emergence of fascism at the dawn of the 21st century. But we surely have […]

Are the analytical tools of the past adequate to identify and assess what we perceive as the revival of fascistic tendencies today? My contention is that most academic and non-academic efforts to denounce contemporary forms of fascism fail to come to terms with the structural roots of the problem. Critical theory has never contented itself […]

This event brings together key players in the current and renewed wave of feminism in the Global South. Each of the participants will give a ten-minute presentation touching upon what they see as the most urgent matters at hand, followed by a discussion of political strategies in their respective geographies. By connecting recent Argentine and […]

Among the strong patterns of the post-1980s period in “Western” societies is a mix of economic and political vectors marked by extractive logics. We can find such extractive logics in entities as diverse as mining and Facebook. The rise of such extractive logics is partial, but sufficiently powerful to have altered key features of our […]

This is a multi-day conference (March 9-10). Fire, earth, air, water – the typological order of the elements, dating back to Ancient Greece, has shaped the experience of human life worlds. The natural elements meet the basic needs of sustainability yet, as recent events demonstrate, might suddenly act against these needs in the form of […]

Many people have an intuitive sense that the built environment is bound up with politics. The lecture poses the question how we might think more systematically (and normatively) about the relationship between democracy and architecture as well as public spaces as a particular form of the built environment. A very basic distinction between representing democracy, on the […]

A conversation with Rosalind Morris about her new book, The Returns of Fetishism: Charles de Brosses and the Afterlives of an Idea (Chicago, 2017; with a translation of de Brosses’s ‘The Worship of Fetish Gods,’ by Daniel H. Leonard). In the essays of this book, Morris charts the changing and uneven status of the fetish as an object […]

This conference brings together global reflections on critical memory developed over the last twenty-five years. Historical events such as slavery, colonial conquest, occupation, partition, war, apartheid and dictatorship—as well as democratic transitions, reparations of past injustice, the outlawing of discriminatory practices, and turning points in post-human modes of understanding, both ecological and technological—will provide points […]

This working group meeting will discuss what the “public” in phrases like (digital) public sphere, (virtual) public space, (online) public discourse, and (networked) public good, is or might be. As issues of access and equity increasingly expand into new and diverse frames of communication technologies, how and where do classical formulations of “the citizen,” “the […]

While art exhibitions now take place in abandoned factories or warehouses, artists increasingly take upon themselves tasks of…

This lecture explores the queerness of use as well as uses of queer. The lecture begins with a reflection on the gap between the intended function of an object and how an object is used as a gap with a queer potential. The lecture does not simply affirm that potential, but offers an account of […]

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 PhD students interested in applying to the DE are invited to attend. Refreshments and light snacks will be provided. Serving approximately 100 graduate students from the humanities, social sciences, […]

To kick off the fifty-year anniversary of “May ’68”, this opening working group meeting of the 2018 spring semester turns its attention towards the often unlikely and frequently invisibilized coalitional bedfellows tucked in to the intersectional and transnational histories of Leftist movements of the 1960s, as well as the connections between such movements and “the […]