PHL 2089S The Art of Revolution (co-taught with William Paris)

What is the relationship between art and revolutionary transformation? How is revolution represented and staged in theatre, music, or the visual arts (including cinema, photography, and posters)? Conversely, is there an aesthetic dimension to revolution itself—for example, how are we to understand the dramaturgical, rhetorical, or performative dimension of collective action, and can we understand historical transformation in terms of figure, trope, and genre (epic, tragedy, comedy, etc.)? How are we to understand the seemingly anti-aesthetic, destructive impulse of revolutionary iconoclasm? Finally: What is the role of art in a counterrevolutionary epoch—for example, late capitalism—when social transformation seems impossible, unrepresentable, and even unimaginable? Under such conditions can art be other than consolatory and compensatory?

In this seminar, we will discuss these questions, and more, as we investigate concepts such as reification, alienation, subjectivity (both individual and collective, both conscious and unconscious), ideology, trauma, utopia, and poeisis. There will be a special emphasis on decolonial revolutions and rebellions of the oppressed in the context of racial capitalism. Readings will include a diverse set of authors such as Friedrich Schiller, Marie-Olympe de Gouges, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Éduard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Ida Wells, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Sylvia Wynter, and Christina Sharpe. We will also be looking closely at specific artworks to investigate the relation between the theorization and the production of radical art.

JCY 5116: Freud: Case Histories (syllabus)

his course will be devoted to reading Freud’s case histories. We’ll be paying close attention to the unstable relationship between the theoretical and the clinical registers in Freud’s text, with particular emphasis on the psychoanalytic concepts of transference, resistance, repetition, working-through, “construction in analysis,” and the end-of-analysis. In addition to the major case studies — Dora, Anna O, Little Hans, Schreber, Wolfman, Ratman –we will also consider the snippets of Freud’s own auto-analysis (e.g. the “specimen dream” in the Interpretation of Dreams, the Autobiographical Fragment, and other first-person texts, including Freud’s early correspondence with Fliess). Our reading of the primary texts will be accompanied by recent theoretical and critical engagements with the case histories, including Jacques Lacan, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Jacques Derrida, Jacqueline Rose, and Eric Santner.

COL 5143f: Dramaturgies of the Dialectic, Part I: Hegel. The End of Art and the Endgame of Theater (2021) (syllabus)

During the first semester, we’ll be thinking about some repercussions of Hegel’s infamous and poorly understood pronouncement of the “end of art.” Why does Hegel say that art “no longer counts” as the expression of truth and what does this obsolescence imply for the practice of philosophy and for political practice? We’ll look at the ways in which art, according to Hegel, stages its own undoing at every stage and in every art form (sculpture, painting, music, etc.), but especially in theatre, which Hegel presents both as the “highest” art form and the scene of art’s ultimate undoing. Why does theater occupy this privileged position? And what comes next? We’ll be focusing on selected portions of Hegel’s Aesthetics and the Phenomenology of Spirit, alongside other contemporary writings, such as Lessing, Schelling, and Hölderlin.  And we’ll be reading some of the plays — mostly, but not always, tragedies — they were watching (or at least reading, or imagining watching): Sophocles, Euripides, Schiller, Goethe, Diderot, Aristophanes. And finally, we’ll consider the peculiar afterlife of theatre in philosophy — as a scene of pedagogy, a performance, and a political spectacle. 

COL 5144S: Dramaturgies of the Dialectic, Part II: Tragedy and Philosophy after Hegel (2022) (syllabus)

Philosophy has always had a special interest in tragedy and has often used it as either a negative or positive foil (sometimes both at once) to construct its own self-image. Plato famously banned tragedy; Aristotle recouped it; German idealist philosophers saw in “the tragic” a mirror-image of philosophy’s own preoccupations; Nietzsche blamed philosophy for tragedy’s demise; Marx saw in tragedy’s own (tragic) slide into farce a symptom of practical-theoretical enervation. In this second semester, we’ll explore the entanglement of philosophy and tragedy after Hegel, and in the light of the failed 1848 revolutions, with focused attention on how later thinkers raise the political stakes of this entanglement. We’ll be exploring the links between tragedy and sovereignty; tragedy and revolution; tragedy and gender; the predicaments of decolonial tragedy; the relationship between genre and medium. Readings to include: Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit with Sophocles, Antigone; Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire; Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy; Brecht, Short Organon and selected plays; Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel and “What is Epic Theatre?”; Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame and Beckett’s Endgame; Eisenstein’s Notes towards his (unrealized) film version of Capital; C.L.R James, The Black Jacobins and his Toussaint Louverture (the play); Nicole Loraux, Mothers in Mourning; Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim; Tina Chanter, Whose Antigone?; Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy.

COL5081: Benjamin’s Arcades Project (syllabus)

This course will be devoted to a close reading of the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin’s unfinished and posthumously published montage of fragments, quotations and aphorisms on the urban culture of Second Empire Paris – “capital of the nineteenth century. ”   Both the birthplace of consumer capitalism and the site of numerous failed revolutions, nineteenth century Paris crystallized, for Benjamin (writing during the rise of European fascism) the numerous ambiguities of modernity itself.    Many of these ambiguities were registered in disorienting new experiences of space and time.  While exploring Benjamin’s reading of the various strands of nineteenth century visual, literary and architectural culture – fashion, photography, advertising, lighting, furniture, railways, exhibitions, department stores, catacombs, museums, etc.– we will consider the implications of his approach for thinking about history, memory, and politics today. Our reading of the Arcades will be supplemented with readings from Baudelaire, Blanqui, Fourier, Marx, Adorno, Brecht, Aragon, Simmel, and Freud as well as contemporary critical theorists. No specific background is required, but it would be helpful to have read Marx’s  Eighteenth Brumaire beforehand.

PHL2084: Hegel/Marx (syllabus)

In his 1873 afterword to the 2nd edition of Capital, Marx announced his ambivalent fidelity to the Hegelian legacy, variously describing his own project as a “flirtation with Hegel,” a (materialist) “inversion” of Hegel, and as a surgical extraction of the “rational kernel” of the dialectic from its metaphysical Hegelian carapace. Ever since, Marxists have never stopped arguing about what that kernel might be or even if there is one. Is Hegel the key or the impediment to unlocking Marx’s own radical potential? Some turned to Hegel’s celebrated parable of the Master/Slave with its supposedly emancipatory conclusion. Some tried to climb the austere scaffolding of the Science of Logic with its demonstration of the destabilizing power of contradiction. Lenin, who was feverishly annotating the Logic while preparing for the revolution, remarked that it was impossible to understand the first chapter of Capital – or likely anything  else – “without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic.”  Some wondered whether the Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s most notoriously reactionary text, could be purged of its “Prussian” orientation. Some refused the salvage operation, arguing that it was a lingering attachment to Hegel that was the source of Marxism’s most retrograde commitments -- teleology, totality, the forced march of progressive universal history…. This was never an arid philological exercise. For the first half of the twentieth century, the debate took place against the backdrop of two world wars, the Russian Revolution, fascism, genocide, the entrenchment and expansion of Stalinism. Later, it continued in the context of decolonial struggles, the intensification of global capitalism, more genocides, the civil rights movement, and the rise of new social movements. In this course, we’ll be exploring the Hegel/Marx entanglement in the light of the current political conjuncture. What might it mean, today, to take seriously the possibility of an encounter between a materialist Hegel and a speculative Marx? We’ll be thinking not only about the standard chestnuts - labor, alienation, surplus value, exploitation, fetishism, ideology, class struggle, revolution, communism -- but also about issues that were undertheorized (or badly theorized) by both authors, notably, race, gender, and the vicissitudes of nonproductive and reproductive labour. 

Primary readings:  Hegel: selections from Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, Philosophy of History, Philosophy of Right. Marx (and/or Engels): selections from Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “Economic and Political Manuscripts” (1844), Holy Family, German Ideology, Eighteenth Brumaire, Grundrisse, Capital. While we’ll focusing mainly on the writings of Marx and Hegel, we’ll also be considering the trajectory of Hegelian Marxism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (e.g. Vladimir Lenin, Karl Korsch, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Raya Dunayevskaya, C.L.R James, Rosa Luxemburg. Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žizek). And, for a taste of anti-Hegelian Marxism: Louis Althusser.   

COL5138: Beckett and Philosophy (syllabus)

Beckett was notoriously skittish about philosophical approaches to his work, and this reticence has naturally made him even more adorable to philosophers of all stripes. This course will be exploring the fraught relationship between Beckett and philosophy, trying to think about what might be at stake in his recalcitrance. We’ll be reading a variety of Beckett’s works, from his early poetry and fiction to his late experimental texts –  the stories; the poetry; the novels; the stage plays and “dramaticules”; the work in radio, film, and television; and the unclassifiable remainder — paying particular attention to the ways in which his writing puts pressure on the concepts of genre, medium, language, translation, history, and politics.  We’ll also be considering some of Beckett’s philosophical interlocutors, including Bataille, Blanchot, Lukacs, Adorno, Kristeva, Badiou, Cixous, and Deleuze.

COL 5085Y : PROUST (syllabus)

We’ll be reading In Search of Lost Time in its entirety.  The priority will be to read Proust., it would be nice to get a glimpse of the critical landscape along the way. To this end, each week’s readings will be accompanied by a short theoretical text pertaining to or inspired by Proust (he became a magnet for virtually all 20C philosophers.) Authors will include: Theodor Adorno,  Roland Barthes, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Paul de Man, Gilles Deleuze, Georges Didi-Huberman, Gérard Genette ,René Girard, Julia Kristeva, Emmanual Levinas, Jacqueline Rose, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

COL5067: RUINS

This seminar will consider the ruin as a key trope for modernity: the theorization of history as catastrophe and decay (Adorno, Benjamin, Sebald); natural and historical disaster (Voltaire, Kleist and the Lisbon earthquake); Pompeii and Rome in the historical imagination (Gibbon, Piranesi, Freud); politics of empire and nation (Volney); iconoclasm, revolutionary vandalism, and the tabula rasa (Hubert Robert, Abbé Grégoire); the ruin in relation to literary modes such as fragment and allegory (Schlegel) or to broader aesthetic categories of the picturesque, the sublime, or the sentimental (Burke, Diderot, Caspar David Friedrich); artificial and apotropaic ruins; urban and industrial ruins; the ruin in relation to contemporary discourse of the trace, ghost, and remnant (Derrida, Agamben, Nancy).  A significant focus of the course will be on the ruined landscapes of post-WW II (e.g. Warsaw, Berlin, Hiroshima) and on the contemporary memory industry that continues to respond to this.  Questions of architecture and urbanism will be central in this context, as well as photography and cinema (e.g. Alain Resnais, Alexander Kluge).

COL Destruction of Images (syllabus)

From the demolition of monasteries during the Reformation to the dismantling of communist monuments after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the destruction of images can be a way of marking time and signaling cultural and political transition.  It can be a religious gesture directed against the false authority of idols or an anti-religious gesture directed against sacral authority as such.  It can function as an assertion of power and as a protest against existing power.  And it can function as a constructive principle: it can draw attention to the broken, the incomplete, the ephemeral, the entropic, the anachronistic, the imperfect, the overlooked, the unbeautiful.  The American artist Gordon Matta-Clark centered his artistic practice on “unbuilding”: he transformed the urban landscape by slicing into abandoned buildings.  In his “Erased De Kooning Drawing,” Robert Rauschenberg produced a work that consisted solely in the effacement of his mentor’s artwork.  In “Disintegration Loops,” a work accidentally created in 2001 while he was transferring his own previous reel-to-reel taped compositions to digital format (and by his own account at the very moment that the Twin Towers were collapsing), William Basinski captured the sound of music’s decay.  And William Kentridge uses erasure as a technique for producing his animated projections bearing directly on transitional issues in post-apartheid South Africa.  This course will explore how ideas and practices of destruction force us to think not only about the status of images and objects but about broader questions of space and time, memory and history, and about the social and political issues pertaining to property, territory, and sovereign power.  In addition to considering a variety of artistic works in different media (from Balzac to Beckett, from Robert Smithson to John Cage) we will be reading a range of religious, philosophical and political writings, including the Talmud, Tertullian, Calvin, Kant, Hegel, Benjamin, Adorno, and Eyal Weizman.

JPC 2089: Political Theologies (syllabus)

In a classic essay of 1981 Claude Lefort suggests that the conjunction of the theological-political might be “permanent” – that is, that theological issues continue to cast their shadow over the discourse of modern secular politics.   Nowhere is the issue more volatile than in today’s globalized world.  This course will explore some of the modalities of this persistence.   We will explore the interlacing of theology and politics in recent and not so recent continental philosophy, with a particular focus on concepts of sovereignty, nationalism, democracy, revolution, freedom, biopolitics, human rights, legitimacy, and authority. Authors will include: Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Claude Lefort, Werner Hamacher, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek. 

PHL 2089: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, Globalization