PHL 316: Hegel’s Phenomenology (syllabus)

These lectures, which were all delivered during the pandemic and recorded over Zoom, will also be found uploaded under “videos.”

PHL 410S: Reading Capital Today (2025)

In this seminar we’ll be attempting a careful reading of Marx’s Capital and thinking about its contemporary relevance. We’ll be examining some of his core concepts  — use-value/exchange-value, commodity fetishism, abstract and concrete labour, money, the working day, formal and real subsumption, absolute and relative surplus value, “primitive accumulation,” unemployment and the production of surplus populations. As we try to work through these concepts, we’ll also be looking for what David Harvey has called “points of stress” in Marx’s system – concepts that are problematic, unresolved, underdeveloped, or anachronistic. What in Capital needs to be revised, expanded, jettisoned, or updated today? We’ll be looking particularly at feminist, Black, anticolonial, indigenous, and environmentalist critiques that have taken issue with and tried to correct Marx’s seeming disregard for the role of unpaid reproductive labour in sustaining capitalist production; for his blindsiding of the racial origins of modern capitalism and the central role of plantation slavery; for his under-theorization of the ongoing history of colonial dispossession, resource extraction, and environmental devastation.  And we’ll be asking whether the categories developed in Capital are sufficient to account for the vicissitudes of  “late” or “neoliberal” capitalism — the new forms of exploitation and immiseration introduced by the global supply chain, the prison-industrial complex, financialization, digital labour and the platform economy, the generation of a global precariat, and the commodification of everything.  Finally: is the category of revolutionary class struggle still viable today?

Readings: We’ll be focussing mainly on the first volume of Capital supplemented by selections from the other two volumes.  This will be accompanied by texts by contemporary thinkers such as David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Silvia Federici, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis, Glenn Coulthard, Tithi Bhattacharya, Kathi Weeks, John Bellamy Foster, and Jason Moore.

The first new English translation in of Capital in over 50 years will be released in October, 2024 (Princeton UP), so you’ll get to be among the very first readers to work intensively with this monumental new text.  This is the only text you’ll need to buy; all other readings will be posted on Quercus.

LCT 304F  – Performance and Praxis (2024)

“Drama” means “action,” in Greek, while “theater” derives from the same root as “theory” (these latter terms have something to do with seeing as well as thinking.)  Whatever else is going on, theatres are public places of assembly that offer a channel between ideas and actions, theory and practice, thoughts and deeds.  This is probably why theaters have often thrived during times of revolutionary upheaval, and also why they have been so frequently subject to censorship and censure. The theatre is a place where anxieties and desires are experienced and forged around the unstable relationships between words and actions; between private and public; individual and collective; seeing and being seen; the visible and the invisible; exposure and disclosure; presence and absence; acting and pretending (or mere “acting”); spectatorship and surveillance; empathy and voyeurism; representation and misrepresentation; spontaneity and habit; inclusion and exclusion.

But theatre is also a place which lets us observe and reflect on how these relationships play out unevenly along social lines --class, gender, race, sexuality, ability/disability, age, religion, etc... In this course, we’ll be looking at a variety of texts, films and performances that explore some of these shifting relationships.   We’ll be thinking about the connection between theatres and other spaces of spectatorship and performance–the law-court, the sports arena, the prison, the place of worship, the festival, the domestic interior, the airport, the lecture hall, the street, the political assembly. We’ll be thinking about the shifts in spectatorship introduced by new technologies (film, internet, AI). Inevitably, and throughout the course, we’ll be thinking about the classroom and the university (physical, virtual, imaginary, impossible) as a scene of pedagogy, performance, disciplining, surveillance, and (sometimes) activism.  

Works will include: Shakespeare, Hamlet; Alfred Hitchcock, Stage Fright; Diderot, “Paradox of the Actor”; Sergei Eisenstein, October: Ten Days that Shook the World; Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (excerpts); Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Subordination”; Samuel Beckett, Catastrophe and other short plays; Brecht, “What is Epic Theatre?”; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (excerpts);  Frantz Fanon, “The ‘Fact’ of Blackness,” in Black Skin, White Masks; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (excerpts); John Cage,  4’33”; Franz Kafka, “The Hunger Artist”: Marina Abramovič, The Artist is Present (exhibition); Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1980–1981; Chris Burden, Bed Piece; Mona Hatoum, Performance Still; Laura Poitras, Citizenfour;  Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (excerpts); Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File; Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons.

PHL 319: Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (2022)

Psychoanalysis not only puts pressure on core philosophical ideas about personal identity, self-knowledge, human freedom, and the very status of the human. It also introduces some fundamental hermeneutic questions about how we interpret and analyze texts. We’ll look at the beginnings of psychoanalysis in Freud’s early work on hysteria and try to understand what was at stake in his invention of the “talking cure.” We will explore core concepts produced in the course of Freud’s career — the dream work and the method of dream interpretation, the so-called “fundamental rule” of free association, the unconscious, repression, castration, transference, melancholia, fetishism, resistance, repetition, the death drive, interminable analysis, and the limits of analysis. We will consider the relation between psychoanalysis as a theory and psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice (this will also involve thinking about the status of Freud’s case histories as evidence, as investigations, and as narrative experiments). Finally, we will examine the idea of “applied” psychoanalysis, and particularly the relevance of psychoanalysis to the understanding of culture and politics. This will inevitably lead us to think about the relevance of psychoanalysis today. While this course will focus mainly on Freud’s own theoretical and clinical writings (including some of his most controversial texts on the family, gender, and sexuality), we will also consider contemporary engagements with Freudian thought, in particular feminism, trauma studies, and queer theory.

Readings will include “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (Dora case history), Interpretation of Dreams (selections), “Infantile Sexual Theories,” Mourning and Melancholia,” “The Uncanny,” “Wolfman” case history; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.”

PHL 410: Psychoanalysis and Politics (2024)

Born at a time of social and political crisis and within a parochial European context, psychoanalysis was split from the outset between a seemingly conservative and a politically radical and even revolutionary tendency. These two tendencies cannot be easily disentangled, and the split itself may turn out to be constitutive of psychoanalysis as both a theory and a clinical practice. This course will explore some of the political challenges and opportunities of psychoanalysis in the century after Freud, as psychoanalysis is increasingly confronted with the urgent and interconnected pressures of Marxism, feminism, queer theory, decolonial and critical race theory — broadly speaking, the conjuncture of race/class/gender. These challenges take on a particular intensity in the contemporary context of “late” or neoliberal capitalism. Can psychoanalysis provide a critical lens and emancipatory lever in the present? We’ll be considering the political resources of psychoanalytic concepts of repression, desire, transference, identification, mourning and melancholia, fetishism, disavowal, trauma, resistance, and the death drive. We’ll obviously also have to engage with some of Freud’s most contentious and misunderstood formulations around gender, sexuality, and castration — along with Oedipus and his family (a dysfunctional family if there ever was one).

Alongside some core Freudian texts (Three Essays on Sexuality, Mourning and Melancholia, The Ego and the Id, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Totem and Taboo), authors will include: Louis Althusser, Judith Butler, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Anne Cheng, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Lee Edelman, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Patricia Gherovici, Ranjana Khanna, Jacques Lacan, Jacqueline Rose, and Slavoj Žižek. There is no specific prerequisite for this course, although a basic familiarity with basic psychoanalytic concepts will be helpful --it would be great if everyone could read or reread beforehand Freud’s (extremely readable) Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.

PHL 388: Philosophy and Theatre (2022) (syllabus)

“Theory” and “theater” share a common root (“to see”) but their conjunction is far from simple.  Ever since Plato decided to banish the tragic poets from the city, the relations between philosophy and theater have been fraught.  This course will explore some of these frictions, starting with the question: why is philosophy so obsessed with tragedy, while philosophers themselves usually get to appear on stage only as comic characters?   As well as reading philosophical writings on theater — and reading (and seeing, to the extent possible) some actual plays — we will also think about the theatrical dimensions of philosophy itself.  Despite or because of the diversity of its genres (dialogue, meditation, instruction, satire, fable, manifesto, etc.), philosophy has always entertained an uneasy relationship with its own dramaturgical conditions– its stagecraft, its protocols, its (actual or imaginary) audience.  This will inevitably invite us to reflect on the institutional aspects of philosophy as an academic practice and its relationship to other social practices.

VIC 402: Translation and Transmission

What is at stake when we translate a text from one language to another, transpose a work from one medium to another, or transport a cultural object from one location to another? This course will consider the theory and practice of translation in a number of contexts – religious, political, literary, psychoanalytic – and try to think about how the idea of translation connects to ideas about transmission, tradition, travel, transportation, transference (desire), transcendence (divine authority), and power (in particular, the politics and economics of empire and the various post-colonial critiques of this). We will be reading a variety of both theoretical and literary texts (mostly in translation), including: Virgil, Aeneid; Otto of Freising, Two Cities; Luther, “Letter on Translation”; Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation; Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”; Adorno, “On the Use of Foreign Words”; Derrida, “Monolingualism of the Other”; Freud, “The Dynamics of the Transference”; Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”; Homi Babha, The Location of Culture.  

PHL 322: Memory and Forgetting

This course will address the problematic of memory and its various blockages as this has been obsessively theorized in recent years in a variety of intellectual contexts: political, psychoanalytic, philosophical — the relationship between these different registers will also be explored. Drawing on Nietzsche's analysis of the “illness” arising from an over-saturated historical sense, we will examine a number of texts that explore the numerous pressures and paradoxes involved in recollecting or representing the past. Key authors will include: Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, Blanchot, Levinas. (Students might wish to consider supplementing this course with VIC 410Y, a companion course in the Literature and Critical Theory Program, focusing on nineteenth and twentieth-century literary, visual, and cinematic representations of memory and its failures. Writers and authors will include Baudelaire, Rilke, Shelley, Flaubert, Beckett, Melville, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker. Consult the Literary Studies program for details).

VIC 410Y:  Memory and its Discontents

This course will explore various conceptions of memory - in particular, its aesthetic, institutional, and historical dimensions - as expressed in a wide range of nineteenth and twentieth-century literary texts and visual artifacts.  This course will explore some of the specifically modern anxieties arising from an experience of loss which would seem to preclude the possibility of a unified representation of either history or the self.  What are the pressures and opportunities for writing about the past — whether personal or collective (familial, ethnic, national, cosmopolitan or otherwise) — once the belief in a coherent narrative trajectory has been shattered?  Is memory the solution to a fragmented modernity or part of the problem?  Can there be a surfeit, even an illness of memory?  Where is the line to be drawn between memory and forgetting?  Our investigation will include key works in philosophy (Nietzsche, Benjamin), literature (Shelley, Baudelaire, Rilke, Flaubert, Beckett,  Melville),  visual art (Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter) and film (Alain Resnais,  Marguerite Duras, Chris Marker, Christopher Nolan).