Courses
Fall 2024
CTIH-T500, Introduction to Critical Theory: “Theory for Troubled Times”
Professor Joan Hawkins, Media School
Wednesdays, 3 - 5:30, O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs PV270
Film screenings on Wednesday evenings, 7 - 10, Wells Library 048
This class will revisit poststructuralist and postmodern theory within the contemporary context, specifically its relationship to panic culture (both the ways in which it theorizes everyday panic and has been used to construct new, anti-intellectual, anti-theoretical panics both within and without the academy).We willl read theory and see films that address the issues we confronted—and still confront—in everyday life: ambient fear, panic, paranoia, conspiracy theory, epidemic contagion, the role of the media and emerging technologies, perpetual war, cyberspace, the status of the body, sex and gender, race, nationalism, culture, and that thorniest of issues—the relativity of knowledge and truth. While many of the texts were written by academic theorists and scholars for an academic audience, a number target readers outside the academy. Our class discussions will revolve as much around the dialogue between these two kinds of theory—academic and nonacademic—as it will be structured around the topics and themes themselves.
Readings will include: Henry Giroux (2021), Race, Politics and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (London, New York et al: Bloomsbury Academic), Naomi Klein (2023), Doppelganger : A Trip into the Mirror World (NY: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux) to look at some attempts to address contemporary concerns from a theory-friendly perspective. Works by Hal Foster, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, Brian Massumi, Mark Dery, de Certeau, Bourdieu, Latour, Foucault, Paul Virilio, bell hooks, Donna Haraway, Scott Bukatman, Constance Penley, Fredric Jameson, Lawrence Rickels , Leo Bersani, Virginie Despentes, Avital Ronell, Hardt and Negri, Paul Presciado’s Testo Junky and François Cusset’s French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Co Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States.
CTIH-T600, Special Topics in Critical Theory: “Power: The Ontological Modulation of Being”
Professor Edgar Illas, Spanish & Portuguese
Tuesdays, 4:10 - 7:10, Woodburn Hall 006
This course will study a series of theoretical reflections on the elusive category of power. Power is an everyday facticity of the world, but its nature and causes are less evident phenomena. For one thing, a preliminary definition of power already implies an opposing duality: power defines both the capacity to change a state of things and the dominating force that prevents things from changing. This contradictory manifestation of power and counterpower complicates all orders of domination and all desires of liberation. Rather than analyzing power through the lens of social theory or history, the course will examine the metaphysical and political nature of power as ontological modulation of being. We will explore the figure of modulation vis-à-vis parallel concepts such as politics (as negotiation of being), production (as creation of being), and violence (as destruction of being).
We will study four possible enunciations of the ontological question of power: 1) the Foucauldian paradigm of epistemological and institutional regimes of truth; 2) the Nietzschean conception of power as will and desire; 3) the Heideggerian deconstruction of power as clearing and forgetting of being; and 4) the Spinozian concept of the self-caused substance of God and the world. We will examine the overlapping and differences of this tentative fourfold mapping of the thinking of power, a task that will also involve other thinkers, from Aristotle to Antonio Negri and Fred Moten. Finally, as a case of theoretical practice but also as an act of critical reassessment, we will study the relation between blackness and power. Specifically, we will focus on the connections between the “modulatory force” of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the contemporary theorizations of Afro-pessimism, disempowerment, and ontological death.
Spring 2025
CTIH-T600, Special Topics in Critical Theory: “Heidegger’s Being and Time: History and the Darkening of World"
Professor Patrick Dove, Spanish and Portuguese
Mondays, 3:10 - 5:40, Biology Building (Jordan Hall) A107. Meets with HISP-S 695.
Martin Heidegger’s 1927 opus magnus Being and Time develops themes and concerns that have become indispensable for intellectual traditions including Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxism and post-Marxism, deconstruction, subaltern and postcolonial studies, and feminism: Dasein and thrownness; being-toward-death; finitude and quasi-transcendence; temporalization and historicity; the ontico-ontological difference; the history of metaphysics and its closure; and so on. One focal point for the seminar is what Heidegger calls world. This term is a central node in Heidegger’s conceptual vocabulary. While in our everyday language we tend to treat “world” as the most obvious of all referents, for Heidegger “world” names a network that only rarely becomes apparent to us. It is the horizon within which beings disclose themselves to and act in relation to one anothe. Yet as the conditioning possibility for thinking, speaking and acting, world remains inaccessible to thought. Indeed, it would seem that world only becomes available to us as a “thing”—not an object, but as a matter, as something we can mull over and concern ourselves with—in those moments when its integrity and its stability has become doubtful. The seminar will bring Heidegger’s treatment of world and its limits into conversation with contemporary debates concerning the precariousness of our world (e.g., Jean-Luc Nancy, Carlo Galli, and Saskia Sassen on globalization, violence and destruction; Claire Colebrook on climate change and extinction).
CTIH-T600, Special Topics in Critical Theory: "The Paradigm of Play"
Professor Jonathan Elmer, English
Mondays and Wednesdays, 9:35 - 10:50 AM, Cedar Hall C103. Meets with ENG-L 740.
“Play is older than culture,” writes John Huizinga in the first sentence of his classic work, Homo Ludens. He’s right: the range and complexity of play behaviors in the animal world remain a challenge to describe, and resistant to explanation by evolutionary theory. Huizinga’s opening salvo also recognizes the way the problem of play draws thinkers to the edge of their disciplinary boundaries, and then carries them beyond.
This course will be primarily about theories of play behavior, and how those theories affect thinkers in philosophy, history, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, hermeneutics, and sociology. The first two thirds of the class will provide a tour through treatments of play by some of the following thinkers: Saussure, Wittgenstein, Huizinga, Caillois, Gadamer, Fink, Bateson, Suits, Turner, Lévi-Strauss, Benveniste, Klein, Winnicott, Piaget, Carse, and Derrida. The last third will look at contemporary theories—those written after the rise of personal computing and computer gaming—by figures like Castronova, Bogost, Myers, McGonigal, Juul, and Jagoda. Students will be invited to explore the theoretical arguments on their own, or test them through an in-depth treatment or some form of play or game.
Fall 2025
CTIH-T500, Introduction to Critical Theory: "Theory and Resistance"
Professor Patrick Dove, Spanish & Portuguese
Mondays, 3:55 – 6:25 PM, Auditorium 151. Meets with HISP-S 512.
This course provides a foray into theoretically informed work in the humanities, with a focus on key questions and debates that have shaped humanistic reflection on the ways in which we understand and move about in our world. The course does not pretend to be a survey providing comprehensive coverage of the intellectual traditions and methodologies associated with doing theory in the humanities. The primary goal, instead, is to explore how what we call “theory” is in fact the name for an unresolved torsion: between theory understood as knowledge production and theory understood as inquiry into where and how structures designed to produce and secure meaning and order sometimes do not work as intended. In his famous essay “The Resistance to Theory,” Paul de Man enigmatically asserts that “nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself this resistance.” The guiding double hypothesis for this course is that theory and resistance cohabitate, so to speak, albeit without ever coming together to form a unity or a stable ground. Unlike philosophy, which understands its task as that of generating systematic forms of knowledge, theory concerns itself with the inconsistencies, knots, and lacunae that inhabit thinking while resisting assimilation within the logic of any system.
We will read selections from variety of traditions including Continental philosophy, Marxism and post-Marxism, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism, subaltern/postcolonial studies, queer studies, and deconstruction. At the same time, we will explore some literary works from the Latin American tradition in which there may be some interplay or tension between literariness and theoretical inquiry. We will use works by César Vallejo, Rubén Darío, Delmira Agustini, Alejandra Pizarnik, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Germán Rozenmacher, and Luisa Valenzuela as starting points for thinking about how what we call “theory” seems to designate an unstable intermediate space between philosophical systematicity and literary language.
Discussions will be organized in seminar format, with each student responsible for presenting or leading class discussion on a topic to be chosen in consultation with me. While the course will be officially conducted in English, participants are welcome to intervene in whatever language they feel most at ease. Students will write a short response paper and a longer final research paper.
CTIH-T600, Special Topics in Critical Theory: "The Value of Nature"
Professor Drew Dalton, English
Mondays and Wednesdays, 9:35 - 10:50 AM, Ballantine Hall 306. Meets with ENG-L 740.
A nearly dogmatic assumption plagues the Western theoretical imagination concerning the moral status of nature, an assumption that permeates all that we say and do in relation to the world. The assumption is that there is an order to nature and that, moreover, this order is good; and, if it weren’t for our meddling, then the earth would be in perfect symbiotic balance with itself. This assumption fuels the handwringing that accompanies our discussion of the so-called “Anthropocene.” It drives our escapist fantasies of “getting back to nature” and informs “sustainable” environmental policies and practices which endeavor to save nature from us. Here, the human being and its activities are understood as being somehow unnatural or nonnatural, as if they stood outside the bounds of the same laws of nature that govern every other existent thing.
The aim of this course is to ask: whence this assumption? And whence the concomitant presumption that the human stands beyond the realm of nature? Whence the status of nature in the Western theoretical imagination as an absolute good, sacrosanct and separate from our own activities? Are there other, perhaps better, or at least more justifiable theoretical positions we might take on the order, operation, and value of the natural world that would include our activities, destructive as they are?
To answer such questions, this course will: 1) establish a genealogy of the Western theoretical position on the order and moral status of nature, 2) examine how that theoretical position has become a dogma, 3) show how and where that dogma is still manifest in contemporary theories, even where one might otherwise expect to see it overturned, and 4) survey other, alternative theoretical approaches to the order, operation, and moral status of the natural world as well as the relation of human activity in and to it. We will read contemporary scientific theories, a few non-Western theories, and other theoretical positions typically rejected by the Western theoretical imagination, like pessimism.
Readings may include works by Plato, Augustine, Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Philipp Mainländer, Jeremy England, and others.
CTIH-T600, Special Topics in Critical Theory: "The Disappearance of Man"
Professor Eyal Peretz, Comparative Literature
Wednesdays, 3:55 - 6:25 PM, Ballantine Hall 142. Meets with CMLT-C 602.
From Foucault’s famous prophecy (in The Order of Things) regarding the disappearance and erasure of man to the apocalyptic visions of the thinkers of the anthroposcene (where, paradoxically, the appearance of man as a geological factor seems to announce his coming extinction); from the growing anxiety in the face of the surge of artificial intelligence to the pronouncements of the anti-natalists regarding the voluntary extinction of humanity, the contemporary moment seems to be haunted by the image or figure of man’s disappearance. Yet what is it that appears when man disappears? A new nature? A new god? A new technology? Perhaps a new understanding of the human as disappearance? The focus of this class will be double: first, we will test the hypothesis that the most profound engagement with the mystery of the image of man’s disappearance takes place in the works of art (paintings, literature, films) of the modern age, going as far back as the Renaissance to contemporary science fiction; second, that the most profound conceptual engagement with the above mentioned mystery takes place in the contemporary tradition responding to—whether implicitly or explicitly—the philosophical efforts of Martin Heidegger to replace the classical concept of man.
Readings will include Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Nancy, Stiegler, Harraway, as well as several other contemporary thinkers of technology, the environment, cyborgs, etc. Viewings and literary readings may include Leonardo, Rembrandt, Caspar David Friedrich, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Celan, Kubrick, Antonioni, Nolan, Le Guin, Philip k. Dick, Georges Perec.
Spring 2026
CTIH-T600, Special Topics in Critical Theory: "Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal: Three Modernities"
Professor Hall Bjørnstad, French & Italian
What happens when a reader informed by recent theoretical inquiries approaches an early modern text? Will the theory illuminate the text or only colonize it? Is the absence of present-day concerns desirable or even possible while reading texts from the past? Conversely, to what extent can the engagement with earlier texts prove helpful, even essential for our thinking about more contemporary concerns? How does our theoretical understanding of the past as new beginnings, roots, genealogies, prehistories, thresholds, reoccupations or ruptures inform the purpose of the work we do in the humanities and our contribution to the thinking about contemporary problems? And how do foundational texts from the past change when we approach them with new questions addressing issues such as indigeneity and race?
This graduate seminar will explore questions like these through a comparative exploration of key texts by Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), René Descartes (1596-1650) and Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), and of their mobilization in canonical reflections on the predicament of modernity, not only among mid- to late-twentieth century French theorists, including Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Barthes, Nancy, de Certeau and Marin, but also German theorists from Benjamin and Auerbach to Blumenberg, just to mention a few. Montaigne, Descartes and Pascal have been posited as the origin of wildly different – and often competing notions of – modernity. What is left of these modernities today? How can each of them – and the constellation of the three – inform and challenge our theoretical inquiries in 2025/2026? Does the notion of an “early modernity” at work in key theories of modernity from the recent past have a future?
For the final project for this course, the participants will have the choice between writing a traditional research paper or a “book review essay,” where a minimum of two critical texts are assessed in a way that highlights and reflects on the relationship between recent critical inquiries in the humanities and an early modern text (by Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal or another early modern writer). The course will not require any prior knowledge of the three early modern writers or their historical context, and all readings and class discussion will be in English.
CTIH-T600, Special Topics in Critical Theory: "The Philosophers After the Expulsion of Poetry"
Professor Carlos Colmenares Gil, Comparative Literature
“And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are lovers of poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on her behalf: let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to States and to human life…” Plato, The Republic.
How have contemporary philosophers and theorists in the 20th and 21st centuries, not necessarily defended, but simply talked about poetry? Could we trace a history of contemporary thought by focusing on the engagement of thinkers of the present with the question of poetry? Its utility, its link with politics, and its recalcitrant intervention in the regime of the senses? In this course we will grapple with the aftermath of Plato’s indictment, while at the same time reflecting on María Zambrano’s description, in the 1930s, of poetry’s constitutive status of displacement, of having to live at the margins pronouncing inconvenient truths, which in a way exemplifies the reconsideration of poetry by thinkers and thought in recent times. We will read authors such as Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger, Arendt, Rancière, Irigaray, Glissant, Kristeva, and Moten, among others.
