Past Events: 2022

November 2, 2022

POSTPONED | RED SQUARE IMPOSSIBLE PINK: NEOLIBERALISM AND PERCEPTION IN THE ART OF MELANIE SMITH

15 November 2022 -

Please note that the scheduled November 15 event with Robin Greeley, “Red Square Impossible Pink: Neoliberalism and Perception in the Art of Melanie Smith,” has been postponed until the spring 2023 semester.

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ANTICOLONIALISM AS THEORY SYMPOSIUM (DAY TWO)

    • 01 October, 2022, 9:00 am - 8:00 pm
    • UC Berkeley

  • This two-day symposium, hosted by the Association of Postcolonial Thought and the University of California-Berkeley, looks to bring together a diverse, interdisciplinary body of scholars and instigators to revive anticolonialism as theory.

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  • ANTICOLONIALISM AS THEORY SYMPOSIUM (DAY ONE)
    • 30 September, 2022, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm
    • UC Berkeley

  • This two-day symposium, hosted by the Association of Postcolonial Thought and the University of California-Berkeley, looks to bring together a diverse, interdisciplinary body of scholars and instigators to revive anticolonialism as theory.

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  • RITHY PANH IN PERSON: “IRRADIATED”

    Rithy Panh, Documentary Film Director and Screenwriter, Cambodia/France; Boreth Ly, Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Art History and Visual Culture, UC Santa Cruz

    • 25 September, 2022, 3:30 pm - 5:30 pm
    • Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), 2155 Center Street, Berkeley

  • This fall BAMPFA is honored to have Rithy Panh present two of his recent films in person. A survivor of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal regime, Panh has devoted his career to telling the stories of the perpetrators and some two million victims who died in extermination prisons and labor camps in Cambodia between 1975 and […]

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  • RITHY PANH IN PERSON: “THE MISSING PICTURE”

    Rithy Panh, Documentary Film Director and Screenwriter, Cambodia/France; Khatharya Um, Associate Professor of Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, UC Berkeley

    • 24 September, 2022, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
    • Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), 2155 Center Street, Berkeley

  • This fall BAMPFA is honored to have Rithy Panh present two of his recent films in person. A survivor of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal regime, Panh has devoted his career to telling the stories of the perpetrators and some two million victims who died in extermination prisons and labor camps in Cambodia between 1975 and […]

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  • ON BECOMING A COMMODITY, OR THE MAKING OF “MODERN HISTORY” IN MARITIME SOUTHEAST ASIA

    Anna Tsing, Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz

    • 22 September, 2022, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
    • 370 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

  • In the Spice Islands, today’s Maluku (Indonesia), European trade stimulated a great boom in slave raiding. Many enslaved people were passed from Maluku elites to Europeans and shipped westward to work in plantations and mines as well as in personal service. Yet the meaning and practice of enslavement was contested in Maluku. This talk considers the emergence of the commodification of human beings within the interaction of Europeans, Maluku elites, and the “Papuan raiders” who procured most of the enslaved—as well as suffering enslavement themselves.

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  • RE-ENVISIONING FREEDOM: ETHICAL AND POLITICAL AGENCY IN OUR TIMES OF ECOLOGICAL DISASTER

    Maeve Cooke, Professor of Philosophy, University College, Dublin; Response by Martin Jay, Professor Emeritus of History, Emeritus Co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley

    • 24 May, 2022, 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
    • 3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

  • In-Person: 3335 Dwinelle Hall, University of California, Berkeley (The Program in Critical Theory asks that in-person attendees be masked and vaccinated) Or join the live Zoomcast: Register here.  Maeve Cooke is Professor of Philosophy–and former Head of the School of Philosophy–at University College Dublin, Ireland, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. An internationally […]

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  • IDEAS WITHOUT WORDS: FURIO JESI & THE CULTURE OF THE RIGHT

    Alberto Toscano, Professor of Critical Theory in the Department of Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London

    • 05 May, 2022, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
    • Nestrick Room, 142 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

  • Shortly before his untimely death, the Germanist and mythologist Furio Jesi (1941-1980) published a nuanced, trenchant and controversial anatomy of right-wing thought, Cultura di destra (1978), cutting across its diverse reactionary, modernist, traditionalist and racist formations. Jesi excavated the culture of the right’s defining reliance on a mythological machine that produces the past as “a […]

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  • FROM DISOBEDIENCE TO SOLIDARITY: CONFRONTING AUTHORITARIANISMS

    Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), Spain

    • 28 April, 2022, 9:00 am - 2:00 pm

  • The event will take place at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) in Spain. The seminar will be video recorded. The recording will be available on the CCCB’s YouTube channel after the event. From the Euromaidan protests and the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter and Ni Una Menos, in recent years we have […]

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  • WATERSHED: PUTIN’S REGIME, RUSSIA, AND THE WORLD

    Panelists: Ilya Budraitskis, Artemy Magun, Ilya Matveev, and Oxana Timofeeva; Moderators: Dylan Riley and Alexei Yurchak

    • 25 April, 2022, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
    • Online

  • A panel discussion with four marquee figures among the Russian intellectuals who oppose the authoritarian regime in Russia and the criminal war that it launched. Register here This event will be streamed online via Zoom. Registrants will be sent a Zoom link prior to the event. The war of aggression that the political regime in […]

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  • STARTING AT THE END: PICKING UP THE RELAY OF SHESHER KABITA: THE INAUGURAL MAYA MITRA DAS LECTURE ON TAGORE

    Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Professor at Columbia University, founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society

    • 22 April, 2022, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
    • Berkeley Terrace, Residence Inn by Marriott Berkeley

  • Note: this event has sold out, but ISAS does not expect that everyone who reserved tickets will come so they are encouraging people to come without a ticket.  The Institute for South Asia Studies and the Tagore Program on Literature, Culture and Philosophy at UC Berkeley are privileged to have Dr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, acclaimed Indian literary theorist, […]

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  • RACIAL CAPITALISM: WHAT’S IN A NAME?

    Catherine Hall, Emerita Professor of History, University College London

    • 20 April, 2022, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
    • Social Science Matrix, 820 Social Sciences Building

  • This hybrid event will be held in person in Social Science Matrix and streamed live on Zoom. Register here. Racial capitalism has become a widely used term – but how should we define it and what specific forms does it take? This talk will focus on C18 Jamaica and the ways in which two separate […]

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  • THE CRITIQUE OF ALIENATION

    Pablo Gilabert, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University

    • 19 April, 2022, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
    • 3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

  • This event will take place in person in 3335 Dwinelle and online via Zoom. Register here for online viewing: https://tinyurl.com/PabloGilabert This is a draft of a chapter of my book manuscript Human Dignity and Social Justice (under contract with Oxford University Press). In this book, I extend the Dignitarian Approach I originally developed for human […]

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  • AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND NATION BUILDING | 2022 MARIE G. RINGROSE GRADUATE LECTURE IN ITALIAN STUDIES

    Graziella Parati, Paul D. Paganucci Professor of Italian Literature and Language and Professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College

    • 07 April, 2022, 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
    • 102 Wurster Hall

  • The year 1948 saw the largest number of autobiographies published in the 20th century in Italy. The same year a new constitution was approved and became the foundation of a new democratic Italy nourished by the myth of the resistance to fascism. Former fascists had to find a way to demonstrate their eligibility to being […]

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  • TOWARDS AN OPEN FIELD POETICS OF THE LECTURE (ON BARAKA, OLSON, THE EAST BAY AND THE NORTH SHORE)

    Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

    • 05 April, 2022, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
    • 315 Wheeler Hall (Maude Fife Room)

  • The Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley is pleased to present “Towards an Open Field Poetics of the Lecture (On Baraka, Olson, The East Bay and The North Shore)” a lecture jointly given by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten and jointly sponsored by The Scalapino-Hejinian Lecture in Innovative Poetics and The Bagley […]

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  • FANON, FOUCAULT, AND THE POLITICS OF TRUTH

    Daniele Lorenzini, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick

    • 04 April, 2022, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
    • 3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

  • In What Is Critique?, Foucault famously claims that critique is the movement by which the subject gives herself the right to “question truth about its effects of power” and “question power about its discourses of truth.” This oft quoted passage indicates the twofold task of what Foucault calls the “politics of truth,” but its exact implications […]

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  • CONVERSATION ON BLACK IS THE JOURNEY, AFRICANA THE NAME

    Maboula Soumahoro (University of Tours), Victoria Collis-Buthelezi (University of Johannesburg), Annette Joseph-Gabriel (Duke University), Robin D.G. Kelley (UCLA).

    • 01 April, 2022, 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
    • Online

  • Online Zoom event; Register here Join the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs for a virtual event in a series of interventions organized by the Critical South book series. Black is the Journey, Africana the Name, a conversation with the author Maboula Soumahoro (University of Tours), Victoria Collis-Buthelezi (University of Johannesburg), Annette Joseph-Gabriel (Duke University), Robin D.G. […]

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  • FANON’S “DRAMATURGY” OF CRITIQUE: RACE, BLACKNESS AND PHILOSOPHICAL ADDRESS

    Lucie K. Mercier, Postdoctoral Researcher in Philosophy, Visiting Scholar at the Philosophy Department of the University of Paris 8 and at the Program in Critical Theory, UC Berkeley

    • 31 March, 2022, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
    • 3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

  • My point of departure is the following problem: whilst Frantz Fanon’s works have become central to what might be understood as the critique of race, contemporary concepts of race do not coincide, in any univocal way, with the object of Fanon’s critique. Competing philosophical interpretations of such (present-absent) object have now come to define widely […]

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  • PSYCHOANALYSIS, DREAMS AND POLITICS: ONEIROPOLITICS UNDER CONSTRUCTION

    Rose Gurski, Associate Professor of Psychology at the Department of Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)

    • 29 March, 2022, 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
    • 3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

  • In this talk I will discuss an “oneiropolitical” research intervention in which I am involved in Brazil as a collective effort, and which seeks to establish connections between psychoanalytic listening, the university, the city, and the political. In seeking to articulate together a reading of Walter Benjamin’s texts, psychoanalytic listening, politics, and dreams, we introduce […]

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  • RACIAL CAPITALISM’S INNER LIFE: SECURITY, POLICE POWER, AND THE TACTICS OF ENSOULMENT

    Lee Medovoi, Professor in the Department of English at the University of Arizona

    • 28 March, 2022, 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
    • Online

  • This event will take place online via Zoom. Register here. In Cedric Robinson’s early iteration, “racial capitalism,” placed antiblackness at the heart of capitalist historical dynamics by showing how the black/white color line has motored the process of capital accumulation. Yet racial capitalism has additional applications. It engages the expropriative logic of settler colonial seizures […]

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  • SEMINAR: A CRITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY OF RACE AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

    Hourya Bentouhami, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès; ICCTP Visiting Scholar

    • 15 March, 2022, 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
    • 3401 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

  • What are the virtues and limits of the phenomenological paradigm for thinking about race? The force of phenomenological presentations makes it possible to apprehend both racialization and various forms of bodily resistance to this process. Indeed phenomenology (or rather a minority version of it) makes it possible to think of the structuring of the subject […]

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  • A WORLD BEYOND THE COLONIAL EPISTEMOLOGY: WRITING WITH ENGAGEMENT

    Malcom Ferdinand, Researcher at CNRS (IRISSO/University Paris Dauphine); Natalia Brizuela, CLAS Chair and Professor of Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese at UC Berkeley; and Pedro Rolón, Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley

    • 11 March, 2022, 10:00 am - 11:30 am
    • Online

  • Zoom online event; Register here The series “New Vocabularies, New Grammars: Imagining Other Worlds” focuses on critics and intellectuals who in their writing and thinking undo the divisions and separations between disciplines and genres, as well as divisions between political action and intellectual engagement. In this practice of border/crossing, new languages and grammars can be […]

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  • CIVILIZING THROUGH FOOD: FRENCH FANTASIES ABOUT GASTRONOMY AND THE “MUSLIM DIET”

    Hourya Bentouhami, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès, ICCTP Visiting Scholar

    • 08 March, 2022, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
    • 3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

  • In France, far-right movements have often called attention to how Muslims eat, characterizing ritual slaughter and Ramadan as atrocities and attacks on French national identity. But in recent years, this discourse has been taken up by people across the political spectrum who seek to defend “French cuisine” against Muslim culinary practices. Since Muslims do not […]

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  • OBJECTIVITY IN THE HUMANITIES

    Paul Kottman, Professor of Comparative Literature at the New School for Social Research

    • 02 March, 2022, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
    • 3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

  • Among the various crises facing the humanities, the most serious of all is the erosion of a shared public sense that humanists make an authoritative contribution to knowledge. On the one hand, the tendency to associate objectivity with the kind of knowledge, explanation, and justification characteristic of the natural sciences leads many to conclude that […]

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  • SEMINAR: THE SURREALIST SYSTEM OF JACQUES LACAN: LINGUISTIC, TOPOLOGY & PHENOMENOLOGY

    Fabrizio Palombi, Università della Calabria Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

    • 25 February, 2022, 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm
    • 1229 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

The work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) proceeds by recycling the theoretical components of his research in a process he describes as poubellication (publication-garbage collection), continuously adding to the pile under the influence of the disparate cultural and scientific innovations that he progressively assimilates.

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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.

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