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.
