Spring 2021

Core Courses*

The following courses satisfy Critical Theory Designated Emphasis core course requirements.

Rhetoric 240G 001 (Critical Theory 205)
Rhetorical Theory and Criticism: Black Radical/Modern German Thought

Fumi Okiji
Tuesdays, 2-5 pm, Online
Class #: 31215

The seminar will stage conversations between modern German thought, and contemporary black thought, considering resonances, and the confrontations produced by this interlocution. We will pay particular attention to how the occlusion of black life and being from Western thought might be read as necessary to the safeguard of humanist aspiration, rather than mere European myopia. Toward this we will read Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Nahum Chandler, Fred Moten, R.A. Judy, Frank Wilderson and Calvin Warren, alongside Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Walter Benjamin.

This instance of Rhetoric 240G counts towards Critical Theory DE students’ Critical Theory 205 requirement.

English 250 003 (Critical Theory 240)
Freud and His Followers

Poulomi Saha
Thursdays, 3:30-6:30 pm, Online
Class #: 26134

This course looks at the development of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice and critical methodology in the humanities. We will take up some of its foundational questions – What is a body? What is the social? What do women want? What is the self? What is history? – through an examination of Freud’s key writings and concepts and those of his commentators. More than intellectual genealogy, this course will trace the antecedents and future possibilities of psychoanalytic thinking in feminist, queer, trans, and critical race theories. Readings may include: Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Civilization and Its Discontents, Papers on Technique, “The Uncanny,” and “Negation”; by his interlocutors, Lacan, Ferenczi, Klein, and Abraham; critical work by Fanon, Butler, Sedgwick, Salamon, Gherovici, Marriott, and Spillers.

Law 271.11 (Critical Theory 240)
Law & Political Economy

David Grewal
Wednesdays, 6:25-9:05 pm, Online
Class #: 32650 / Berkeley Law, January 20-April 30

This seminar will focus on recent scholarship at the intersection of law and political economy. It will begin with several sessions introducing the history and theory of mainstream law and economics. It will then broaden out to consider several current law and political economy topics, including antitrust law and policy in the era of tech platforms; law and money; neoliberalism and constitutionalism; and the law and political economy of complex or intersectional inequality (i.e., class, race, gender). This is a rigorous seminar that will engage seriously with both mainstream law and economics and new and critical approaches. Evaluation will be based on student participation, including substantial reading and class discussion, and a final paper.

Real-time attendance at the first class (whether delivered in person or via remote instruction) is mandatory for all currently enrolled and waitlisted students; any currently enrolled or waitlisted students who are not present on the first day of class (without prior permission of the instructor) will be dropped. The instructor will continue to take attendance throughout the add/drop period and anyone who moves off the waitlist into the class must continue to attend or have prior permission of the instructor in order not to be dropped.

These instances of English 250 and Law 271.11 count towards Critical Theory DE students’ Critical Theory 240 requirement.

*Critical Theory 200 will be offered in Fall 2021. Students needing to discuss plans to satisfy CT course requirements that they must have completed by the end of the Spring 2021 semester – but that they are having difficulties doing, scheduling, and/or enrolling for – should write to Patty Dunlap or Dan Blanton.

Elective Courses (Critical Theory 290)

The following courses satisfy Critical Theory Designated Emphasis elective requirements.

Education 281A (Critical Theory 290)
Race, Whiteness Studies, and Education

Zeus Leonardo
Tuesdays, 1-4 pm, Online
Class #: 33079

This course is designed to introduce graduate students to the area of whiteness studies and how it has been taken up by Education scholars. As a relatively recent innovation (arguably about 30 years old), whiteness studies has become a burgeoning literature across many disciplines, from history to literature to education. It asks the student to assess what this innovation within race theory (as well as secondarily within other theories, such as class and gender analysis) produces in terms of knowledge and understanding of a general racial predicament. For example, what is particular about whiteness studies as a field, which classical race scholarship could not have explained adequately? In addition, the course asks what the conceptual and practical applications of whiteness studies might look like in a field like education. For instance, what does focusing on whiteness in a racially charged atmosphere accomplish in the end, even if it aims to study it critically? Finally, the course asks what can be done, in the name of whiteness studies, to ameliorate racial disparities.

English 203 003 (Critical Theory 290)
Graduate Readings: Radical Enlightenment

Amanda Goldstein
Wednesdays, 2-5 pm, Online
Class #: 24892

Channeling the voice of his own Enlightened despot, Kant’s famous answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” included the chilling injunction to “argue as much as you want and about whatever you want, only obey!” In Foucault’s hands, the limit-setting project of Kantian critique yields a positively transgressive “limit-attitude,” yet Foucault is also quite clear that this ethos must turn away from “all projects that claim to be global or radical.” This seminar, on the contrary, turns toward the “radical” pretenses and partisans of Enlightenment – the heretical ontologies, clandestine associations, violent enthusiasms, trans-Atlantic crosscurrents, and hubristic linkages between philosophy and material freedom – against which the canonical statements of Enlightenment liberalism were wrought. What do radical and minoritarian versions of Enlightenment have to teach us about the stakes and limits of the renewed yearning, in contemporary political life, for something like civil, public discourse? What less familiar relationships between reason and emancipation, personal and collective freedom, revolutionary and colonizing violence, revisionary historiography and radical pedagogy, do they imagine? With an eye toward the fictional forms (dreams, dialogues, voyages) that often convey extreme ideas and illicit desires, and keeping in mind the partiality of the textual archive as a record of mass aspirations and casualties, this course will survey some English, German, French and Caribbean expressions of the radical strains in Enlightenment, as scholars from CLR James to Louis Althusser and Srinivas Aravamudan have sought to theorize their ideas and effects. We will study Lucretius and Spinoza in their clandestine Enlightenment circulation and “new materialist” popularity; examine the spread of “Jacobin” science through dissenting societies and public entertainments; trace, with anti-colonial historiographers, the non-European agents and places that shaped Enlightenment from the inside and put its propositions to unauthorized use; and evaluate Enlightenment in Romantic radicalizations and retrospects, asking, with nineteenth-century people, to what extent ideas and their print media authored the American, French and Haitian Revolutions. Readings will be assigned in English translation, but students are encouraged to obtain and read original language editions if they wish.

English 203 004 (Critical Theory 290)
Graduate Readings: Philosophical Contexts for Modernist Poetry

Charles Altieri
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2-4 pm, Online
Class #: 24893

This course will concentrate on supplementary readings that help give context and significance to Modernist writing. It will begin with William James and F.H. Bradley on the concept of experience as an alternative to Romantic ideals of subjective expression. There will be an interlude where we discuss Picasso’s recasting of Cezanne in terms foregrounding tensions between construction and fidelity to nature or “realization.” Then we will spend some time with Hegel’s Lectures in Aesthetics in order to get clear on his ideal of inner sensuousness and the appeal of abstraction as exploring new kinds of concreteness in the arts. Then Heidegger and Wittgenstein will provide exciting frameworks for talking about the kinds of languages that can be foregrounded in imaginative work. We may have a class devoted to Roland Barthes in order to dramatize how fascination can be a plausible ideal for art that avoids moralism. And I want to study Alva Noe, Andy Clark, and David Chalmers in order to develop an ability to elaborate the consequences of contemporary anti-Cartesian approaches to the study of consciousness. And there will be at least one section reading Lyn Hejinian as theorist along with essays on Karen Barard. There will be some classes on Marianne Moore, Myna Loy, and Wallace Stevens highlighting specific works. And we may have each student report on what the student thinks is an important context for the study of this material. I realize now all teaching seems to me involved in making clear the stakes involved in human actions or powers of observation and analysis. This course addresses the stakes in reading Modernism now.

Film 200 001 (Critical Theory 290)
Graduate Film Theory Seminar

Mary Ann Doane
Fridays, 1-4 pm, Online
Class #: 25951

This seminar will examine both traditional and recent critical approaches to a systematic and historical study of film. Although we will emphasize contemporary structuralist-semiotic, psychoanalytical, and socio-critical methods, we will also study the classical debates in film theory about representation, filmic vs. literary signification, sexual difference, and the social function of images in modernism and postmodernism. Illustrations will be taken from film history from 1910 to 1980.

This course offers an advanced introduction to theories of film and other audiovisual media. We will read key works of film and media theory from the early twentieth century through the post-structuralist turn, as well as examining their resonances and afterlives in more recent theoretical projects. We will situate these works in the context of the larger intellectual movements that they emerged from and helped to shape. Topics may include modernity and the culture industry (Frankfurt School), debates over realism and “ontology,” apparatus theory, psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, Marxist media theory, post-modernism, Deleuze and Deleuzean film theory, affect theory, phenomenology, queer theory, and critical race theory. We will consider how recent works of media theory displace the centrality of film as an object, and problematize our understanding of key terms from the history of film theory: the public sphere, the apparatus, and the subject. We will approach audiovisual media as technologies of representation, of cultural fantasy, of perception, and ask how their theorization has been central to the analysis of aesthetics and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to the point that a study of modernity without a theory of film and media is virtually inconceivable.

French 270A 001 (Critical Theory 290)
Literary Criticism: Recent Work in French: Precarity, Care, Security

Eglantine Colon
Tuesdays, 1-4 pm, Online
Class #: 30371

List of works (subject to minor modifications): Critical and theoretical works (excerpts) by Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Alexandre Gefen, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Nancy Fraser, Hi‘ilei Hobart & Tamara Kneese, Sandra Laugier, Caroline Merchand, Achille Mbembé, Precarias a la Deriva, Fréderic Worms, Joan Tronto, Caroline Yusoff. Films by Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne (Rosetta), Mati Diop (Atlantique), Djibril Diop Mambéty (La petite vendeuse de soleil), Céline Sciamma (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu). Literary texts (mostly excerpts) by Paul B Preciado (Testo Junkie), Patrick Chamoiseau (Texaco), Hervé Guibert (À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie or Le protocole compassionnel), Philippe Lançon (Le Lambeau), Antoine Volodine (Le post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze).

Description: Precarity / Care / Security In this seminar, we will explore how thinkers, writers, and filmmakers of these last two decades have thematically and formally engaged with the intricate interactions between precarity, care, and security. We will historicize and conceptualize these notions, retrace their recent emergence in critical discourses, and think through the differentiated experiences and practices they seek to describe. We will attend to aesthetic works that complicate both the theoretical frameworks used to delineate these terms and the discourses and measures through which they get socially activated, regulated, or dysregulated. The precarization of labor in the post-Fordist era, the “universalization of precarity” after 9-11, the neo-liberal privatization of care, the “humanitarian” repression of migrant bodies, the racializing weaponization of security for instance, will be among the contexts defined to account for how recent literature, film and critical discourses have responded to the social dys/regulations of the relationships between precarity, care, and security in the French and Francophone contexts. As we read texts and analyze films, we will ground our investigation in six figurative spaces: the post/colony, the prison, the hospital, the border, home (as an ecological and a domestic construct), and the body. Students will be encouraged to explore, should they want to do so, non-traditional forms of writing (especially auto-theory and creative non-fiction), instead or in addition to the usual academic essays. Readings in French. Seminar in English.

Law 267.4/History 280D (Critical Theory 290)
Law & History Foundation Seminar (American Legal History)

Christopher Tomlins
Tuesdays, 2:10-5 pm, Online
Class #: 33006 / Berkeley Law, January 19-April 30

As in previous years, Law 267.4 will explore the central themes of American legal development, while also investigating the way legal history has matured as a field of study or “discipline.” But we are living in interesting times, in which the varied exploitations of colonialism, racism, and capitalism have been made the subject of intense examination and argument. So, this semester I want to give explicit attention to the question of how history – as theory, as philosophy, as method, or simply as narrative – can help us understand the role that law has played, and plays, in the construction of our times. The course will concentrate on the legal history of the United States, but it will begin and end with pointed glances at two other Anglophone common law jurisdictions – England and Australia. And, to set our discussion of theory and method in legal history off with a bang, we will begin with work by Louis Althusser, one of the most famous Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century, which poses the issue of how we should think about law as a phenomenon. In other words, what is law? Considered as a field of study, legal history is as much history as it is law, and history is primarily a discipline of the book. For this reason, I have chosen to make Law 267.4 a course that focuses on books. Over the course of the semester our goal will be to develop a thorough grounding in American legal history’s formative literatures by reading a wide selection of the field’s best work, ranging from classics that have structured the field, stirred controversy, and inspired generations of scholars (like James Willard Hurst’s Law and the Conditions of Freedom and Morton Horwitz’s Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860), to the best work of the current generation of field leaders (like Laura Edwards’ The People and their Peace and Kunal Parker’s Legal Thought Before Modernism), to notable recent work by rising scholars (like Karen Tani’s States of Dependency and Ken Mack’s Representing the Race). We will accumulate considerable knowledge of the empirical substance of American legal history, but we will also give close critical attention to the very different ways in which scholars have chosen to write the history of American law (and the very different subjects about which they have considered it appropriate to write).

Law 271.11 (Critical Theory 290)
Law & Political Economy

David Grewal
Wednesdays, 6:25-9:05 pm, Online
Class #: 32650 / Berkeley Law, January 20-April 30

This seminar will focus on recent scholarship at the intersection of law and political economy. It will begin with several sessions introducing the history and theory of mainstream law and economics. It will then broaden out to consider several current law and political economy topics, including antitrust law and policy in the era of tech platforms; law and money; neoliberalism and constitutionalism; and the law and political economy of complex or intersectional inequality (i.e., class, race, gender). This is a rigorous seminar that will engage seriously with both mainstream law and economics and new and critical approaches. Evaluation will be based on student participation, including substantial reading and class discussion, and a final paper.

Real-time attendance at the first class (whether delivered in person or via remote instruction) is mandatory for all currently enrolled and waitlisted students; any currently enrolled or waitlisted students who are not present on the first day of class (without prior permission of the instructor) will be dropped. The instructor will continue to take attendance throughout the add/drop period and anyone who moves off the waitlist into the class must continue to attend or have prior permission of the instructor in order not to be dropped.

Philosophy 290 005 (Critical Theory 290)
Politics and the Common Good

Hans Sluga
Wednesdays, 12-2 pm, Online
Class #: 17995

The seminar examines the concept of the common good in classical and modern contexts, both Western and non-Western, and its relation to the idea of social justice. The course begins with some major Western texts on the subject such as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics and John Rawls’ Theory of Justice and then turns to theories from early China (in many cases using translations generated by Michael Nylan). The comparison of the two traditions will bring out the same base-line presumptions, but played out in very different socio-political circumstances. And this is bound to challenge some of the standard assumptions of Western thinking about the ideas of justice and the common good. A final component of the course will be to look at some real-time, real-life situations in which questions about the common good and about social justice and injustice are particularly pertinent.

Rhetoric 200 001 (Critical Theory 290)
Classical Rhetorical Theory and Practice

James I. Porter
Wednesdays, 2-5 pm, Online
Class #: 26677

This seminar offers an introduction to classical rhetorical theory from Homer to Augustine. Secondary readings will be drawn from scholarship in Classics (Vernant, Loraux, Svenbro, M. M. McCabe, Rosalynd Thomas, R. Barney) and from modern philology, philosophy, and theory (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, S. Weil, Arendt, Auerbach, R. Jakobson, J. L. Austin, Foucault, Blumenberg, Balibar, Butler). Topics will include speech and writing; rhetoric and philosophy; language and reality; persuasion, seduction, and epistemological critique; literal and figurative meaning; agency and responsibility; aesthetics, politics, and religion. More details will be made available on bCourses. The final syllabus will be determined at the first session to reflect student preferences. No prerequisites. Open to graduate students from all departments including Critical Theory DE students. Classics students will be encouraged to read texts in the original. Requirements: weekly blog post responses; one to two in-class presentations (depending on the class size); a final research paper geared towards the participants’ own fields.

Sociology 202B (Critical Theory 290)
Advanced Study in Sociology Theory: Contemporary Sociological Theory – Durkheim, Elias, Foucault

Lois Wacquant
Thursdays, 4-7 pm, Online
Class #: 24116

This course sets up a dialogue between Émile Durkheim, Norbert Elias, and Michel Foucault on the themes of modernity, power, and knowledge, and on how the sociological method can help us disentangle their relations. We read and dissect Durkheim on societal crisis, morality, the law, the state and the mission of intellectuals; Elias on homines aperti, figurations, the civilizing process and the birth of the modern individual, and the dialectic of involvement and detachment; Foucault on epistémè, archeology, genealogy, power-knowledge, discipline, biopower and governmentality. We try to extract from these authors tools to help us think our current historical moment.