Speakers include Crystal Bartolovich, Rossen Djagalov, Petrus Liu, Ericka Beckman, Nikhil Singh, Leigh Claire La Berge, Iyko Day, Annie McClanahan, Amy De’Ath, Juliana Spahr, Jasper Bernes, Mark Steven, Michael Shane Boyle, Sarah Brouillette, and Joshua Clover. How is the present-day return to Marx a different one from that of global 1968? A renewed interest in political […]

Advance registration for the seminar is required. To register, please contact info.ictconsortium@berkeley.edu. Etienne Balibar, in discussion with Zeynep Gambetti (Boğazici University, Turkey) and Jacques Lezra (UC Riverside). Balibar will reflect on his relationship to reading Marx, starting with Reading Capital, his early work co-written with Louis Althusser.  He will seek to reconstruct his relation to Marx’s thought, […]

Etienne Balibar will reflect on his relationship to reading Marx, starting with Reading Capital, his early work co-written with Louis Althusser. He will seek to reconstruct his relation to Marx’s thought, communism, and engage the question of communism for the present and future. Etienne Balibar teaches at Columbia every Fall semester. He is Professor Emeritus of moral and political […]

From November 5-24, the Bay Area celebrates the 100th anniversary of surrealism. City Lights Booksellers and Publishers—in conjunction with the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Consortium on Surrealism at 100 (organized by UC Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory), Alley Cat Bookstore, Canessa Gallery, the Consul General of Mexico, Goethe Institute-San Francisco, Lucid Art Foundation, […]

The Program in Critical Theory’s Fall 2019 working group, Theories of the Global South, will host its fifth meeting on November 19 from 5-7 pm in 4104 Dwinelle Hall. To prepare, the co-conveners, Donna Honarpisheh (Comparative Literature) and Devin Choudhury (Rhetoric) kindly request that participants read “Comparative Global Humanities After Man: Alternatives to the Coloniality of Knowledge” by Lisa […]

Panelists from UC Berkeley, Laney College, and Cornell University will include Dan Blanton, Arturo Dávila Sánchez, Catherine Flynn, Robert Kaufman, Francine Masiello, Natalie Melas, Miryam Sas, and Nathaniel Wolfson. This afternoon symposium and discussion—organized by UC Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory—will feature two panels of literary and cultural critics who will reconsider surrealism: its histories, […]

The Program in Critical Theory’s Fall 2019 working group, Theories of the Global South, will host its fourth meeting on November 8 from 12-2 pm, in Dwinelle 4125a (this is a date change from November 5).  To prepare, the co-conveners, Donna Honarpisheh (Comparative Literature) and Devin Choudhury (Rhetoric) kindly request that participants read “The Blues and the Damned: (Black) […]

The primary thesis of this paper is that Heidegger’s “First Elaboration” of the thoughts that would emerge as his essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art” provides a tantalizing brief index of an insight into the work of art from which the later elaborations of the “Artwork” essay would progressively retreat. The secondary […]

This event requires registration. Readings will be emailed two weeks prior to the event. Register online by October 22.  Beginning with the rise of the Tea Party and extending into the Trump era, far-right Republicans have forced a series of debt-ceiling crises and government shutdowns over the alleged federal funding of abortion and birth control. Although perplexing from […]

The Program in Critical Theory’s Fall 2019 working group, Theories of the Global South, will host its third meeting on October 25 from 12-2 pm in 7415 Dwinelle Hall. To prepare, the co-conveners, Donna Honarpisheh (Comparative Literature) and Devin Choudhury (Rhetoric) kindly request that participants read Chapter 1 and Chapter 2—entitled “The Subject of Race” and “The Well of […]

In this talk, Melinda Cooper asks why periods of capitalist breakdown are so often experienced as crises of reproduction and why the imagined solutions to such crises so predictably involve a return to reproductive order, with its attendant hierarchies of gender and race. The paper casts a critical eye on the role played by “reproduction” in […]

Advance registration for the seminar is required. To register and receive materials, please contact info.ictconsortium@berkeley.edu. Theoretical and political debates of the past half-century circled around different notions of the improper—différance, the real, the “other,” antagonism, and excess all allude to an impossibility that disturbs, yet simultaneously lends coherence to, what is deemed proper. However, the play […]

In this seminar, we will investigate the role that neoliberal, ordoliberal and conservative ideas play in the political economy of the European Union. This entails an examination of the basic setup of the European Union and Eurozone and how they correspond to neoliberal designs of a supranational federation, and, particularly, an analysis of the institutional […]

The Program in Critical Theory’s Fall 2019 working group, Theories of the Global South, will host its second meeting on October 8 from 5-7 pm in 4104  Dwinelle Hall. To prepare, the co-conveners, Donna Honarpisheh (Comparative Literature) and Devin Choudhury (Rhetoric) kindly request that participants read the Introduction and Chapter 4 entitled “The Little Secret” of Achille Mbembe’s Critique […]

Neoliberal thinkers developed numerous agendas for the reform of—most notably—democracy and the state. But what is the neoliberal view of politics and, especially, the kind of politics that would bring about these reforms? This is the main question that the talk seeks to address; it does so in three sections. The starting point is a […]

A central concept in Foucault’s later work is Askesis: an exercise of oneself, related to self-mastery and self-transformation. The concept of “ascetic schooling” in the foreword to Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel has a similarly significant role, much neglected by scholarship. Both Foucault’s askesis and Benjamin’s “ascetic schooling” relate to the transformation of the subject through arduous work as fundamental […]

This workshop is conceived in conversation with Algerian-French artist Kader Attia, and in relation to his exhibition on view at BAMPFA. It will engage with many primary themes of Attia’s work, reflecting on trauma and loss, war, colonization, madness and possession, the dead and ghostly, and, the contemporary, virtual form of haunting. It takes its point […]

Recent reconfigurations of political subjectivities in South America gave impulse to the new rise of the right (or what many call the “the conservative restoration”), making hate gravitate as the political affect that infuses new tonalities in the public sphere. These reconfigurations of subjectivity, however, are inseparable from another transformation, that seems unrelated and yet reveals […]

MATRIX artist Kader Attia is joined in conversation by Stefania Pandolfo, a professor of anthropology and member of the Critical Theory Program at UC Berkeley. Attia and Pandolfo will discuss Attia’s approach to the concept of repair and the irreparable, after physical and psychological injury, particularly in a postcolonial context, and will reflect on Attia’s […]

Advanced Registration for this seminar is required. To register and receive the reading materials, please contact info.ictconsortium@berkeley.edu Vilashini Cooppan is Professor of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is the author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (Stanford University Press, 2009). Her essays on postcolonial and world literatures, globalization theory, psychoanalysis, nationalism, […]

The theoretical project of world literature reorients reading in part through a scalar oscillation across the space-time fabric of literary history (old texts and new texts, familiar texts and unfamiliar texts, texts that traverse the locales of the national, the regional, the local, and the global). This talk explores the connections between world-scale concerns, particularly […]

The Program in Critical Theory’s Fall 2019 working group, Theories of the Global South, will host its first meeting on September 10 from 5-7pm in 4104  Dwinelle Hall. To prepare, the co-conveners, Donna Honarpisheh (Comparative Literature) and Devin Choudhury (Rhetoric) kindly request that these texts are read: From the Whole World and the section from Poetics of Relation entitled “Elements”, […]

Christian Metz is Visiting Professor of German Literature and Aesthetics at Johann Goethe-University of Frankfurt, and August Feodor Lynen Fellow in German at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich; he has taught as well at Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of Tromsø in Norway.  Professor Metz is the author of Poetisch denken. Die Lyrik der Gegenwart [Poetic […]

Events with Nadia Yala Kisukidi and Rocío Zambrana Critique/De-coloniality/Diaspora   Monday, May 6 | Lectures | 5-7pm, 470 Stephens Hall Nadia Yala Kisukidi | How to Philosophize in a Dominated Country Rocío Zambrana | Pasarse políticamente: Hopeful Acts of Protest in Puerto Rico Tuesday, May 7 | Seminars | 3401 Dwinelle Hall Nadia Yala Kisukidi | On Returning […]

Reading recent work on Italian Thought and biopolitics, one might be forgiven for thinking that biopolitics and biopower are deeply negative concepts. What gives? Why the relentlessly negative characterization of politics inflected biologically? One reason may well be that in the field of contemporary Italian Thought power often veers toward the tragic. In this talk, […]

Discussants include: Vicki A Spencer* (Otago University, New Zealand) * Purushottama Bilimoria (Moderator) (GTU & UC Berkeley) * Christopher Ocker (GTU, Berkeley, Chair Historical and Cultural Studies)  * Alexander von Rospatt (UC Berkeley) * Aaron Grizzell (GTU & Nor Cal Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Foundation) * Munis Faruqui (UC Berkeley) * Dan Blanton (UC Berkeley) The idea that toleration […]

Deniz Göktürk, Associate Professor, Department of German, UC Berkeley Art as Counter Forensics: Reflections on Structural Racism Following the NSU-Trial Between 2000 and 2006 members of the rightwing extremist terror group National Socialist Underground (NSU) murdered nine small business owners – eight of Turkish and one of Greek descent – and one policewoman in cities across […]

In 1914 the S.S. Komagata Maru left Hong Kong for Vancouver carrying 376 Punjabi migrants. Chartered by railway contractor Gurdit Singh, the ship and its passengers were denied entry into Canada and eventually deported to Calcutta. In Across Oceans of Law Renisa Mawani retells this well-known story of the Komagata Maru. Drawing on what she terms “oceans as method”—a mode of […]

This talk is part of the Department of Rhetoric’s Spring Colloquium. Intensity The concept of intensity is a keystone of process-oriented philosophies, including those of Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze/Guattari, and Simondon, and often figures prominently in contemporary work classified under the label of affect theory. A currently widespread critique of the concept holds that it individualizes […]

Border Surveillance and the Black Mediterranean: Alternative Imaginaries of Refugees, Race and Rights Camilla Hawthorne, Assistant Professor of Sociology, UC Santa Cruz “Citizenship and Diasporic Ethics in the Black Mediterranean” This talk examines the possibilities and limitations of the “Black Mediterranean” (which emphasizes the power-laden relations of cultural exchange and racial violence linking Europe and […]

Hosted jointly by the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE) at the University of Brighton, and the Department of Politics at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, in collaboration with the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs at the University of California, Berkeley, this conference brings together global reflections on critical responses to the fascisms and […]