Critical Theory

Critical Theory | 2014 | Series | Politics Beyond the Human

Critical Theory | 2014-2015

Think

Critical Theory - UC Berkeley

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Won't Do

Lament is at first glance a performative speech act like any other: it enacts the grief it speaks of and thus ineluctably does what it says. But its performativity is peculiar. Rather than demonstrating the potency of language — its ability to produce the state of affairs it designates (I baptize you, I order you, I marry you, etc.) – the lament points rather to an impotence or undoing that erodes the sinews of both speech and action. While the possibility of malfunction is built into every speech act as the structural condition of its own success (strictly speaking, my promise counts as one only if it can be broken; my command has authority only if it can be disregarded), the lament takes failure or dissatisfaction as its founding premise. Infelicity – muteness — is not just a contingent possibility of lament but its founding condition. The expression of loss is bound to a loss of expression that escalates with every measure to staunch it. This seems paradoxical. What creates the plangency and tenacity of lament is precisely what frustrates and disables it. Benjamin explores the twists of this paradox in his Trauerspielbuch. In Hamlet we can see some of its political-theological implications. (Comay)

More information can be found at http://criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Introduction: Robert Kaufman, Professor of Comparative Literature and Co-Director of The Program in Critical Theory, UC Berkeley

Paradoxes of Lament: Benjamin, Trauerspiel, Hamlet | Rebecca Comay | 2/13/14

In his essay, “Critique of Law,” Walter Benjamin analyzes the paradoxical entwinement that ties law to violence. This paradoxical structure forms the mythical fate of law. The talk starts with a reconstruction of this diagnosis in terms of the structure of legal subjectivity. It then explores the question if, and how, a break with fate – or a way out of the paradox of law without reducing its necessity – is possible. The question is how to understand the idea of an “Entsetzung” (relief) of law. (Menke)

Christoph Menke is a Professor of Philosophy at Goethe-University in Germany. More information can be found at http://criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Introduction: Martin Jay, Professor of History and Co-Director of The Program in Critical Theory, UC Berkeley

Law and Violence: The Fate of the Law | Christoph Menke | 2/28/14

New York City has nearly six hundred miles of coastline. We turn our backs on the waters that surround us to our great peril. For many years, experts of various stripes have been warning about the threat posed to the city by climate change-induced rising tides. In 1999, for example, the Environmental Defense Fund published a report titled “Hot Nights in the City: Global Warming, Sea-Level Rise, and the New York Metropolitan Region.” A decade later, MoMA and P.S.1 collaborated on a design competition, “Rising Tides: Projects for New York’s Waterfront,” that was intended to explore innovative solutions to the city’s heightened vulnerability to storm-surge induced inundation. Yet when Hurricane Sandy struck New York just over a year ago, the city seemed almost totally unprepared for the infrastructural and human emergencies provoked by this natural disaster. Numerous factors combined to make New York vulnerable to Sandy, but underlying them all was the fact that we’ve largely forgotten our city’s links to its maritime environment. Since the spread of mass air transport, few of us travel long distances on the surface of the planet’s oceans. Even fewer of us actually depend directly on the sea for our livelihoods. In the words of the filmmaker Alan Sekula, the oceans have become the world’s “forgotten space,” an occult zone absolutely crucial to global economic exchange and yet almost totally elided from cultural representation. This is the story of how we forgot the sea.

Ashley Dawson is a Professor of English at CUNY. More information can be found at http://criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Introduction: Michelle Ty, PhD candidate in English, Designated Emphasis Critical Theory, UC Berkeley

Politics Beyond the Human: How We Forgot the Sea | Ashley Dawson | 4/10/2014

In following the moderns in the making of scientific knowledge, STS scholars have shown an interesting discrepancy between what scientists do in practice and what they say they do in theory. Indeed, scientific objectivity has been entirely reconfigured and reinterpreted in very different ways. In continuity with this endeavor, and because the definition of the object goes hand in hand with the definition of the subject, one of my obsessions has been to re-interrogate the definition of the knowing subject. If another definition of scientific objectivity emerges, and if science is socially or collectively and materially made—depending on our conception of the social—what does this do to our classical notion of the knowing subject? What does it do to the most powerful and operative myth of the modern: “the disincorporated brain”? And by extension, what does it do to our notions of the person, the individual genius, the rational actor, the psyche, and or subjectivity, to which this myth is anchored?

Hélène Mialet is a Scholar-in-Residence with The Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley 2013-2014. More information can be found at http://criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Introduction: Robert Kaufman, Professor of Comparative Literature and Co-Director of The Program in Critical Theory, UC Berkeley

Respondent: Églantine Colon, Professor of French, UC Berkeley

Politics Beyond the Human: How to Think the Knowing Subject Anew?... | Helene Mialet | 4/2/2014

Too Simple

The Lean Startup is a process for turning ideas into commercial ventures. Its premise is that startups begin with a series of untested hypotheses. They succeed by getting out of the building, testing those hypotheses and learning by iterating and refining minimal viable products in front of potential customers.

How To Think Like an Entrepreneur: the Inventure Cycle

The opening session of the Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Working Group provides a space for discussion of the lasting insights, limitations, and potential applications of Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. Linking neoliberalism and biopolitics at both the historical and conceptual level, Foucault’s prescient lecture series lays the groundwork for the working group’s concern with the contemporary management of populations through diverse practices of economization, privatization, and financialization.

Hans Sluga is a Professor of Philosophy and William Callison is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.  More information can be found at criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Revisiting Foucault: The Biopolitics... | Hans Sluga | 9/17/14

In this session, we reflect on how norms and practices of neoliberal governmentality are disseminated and transformed across borders. Professors Rofel and Bargu’s extensive studies of China and Turkey respectively, offer new insights into how different forms of neoliberalism transform social and political life in various contexts, while also calling into question the enduring viability of neoliberalism as an analytic frame. We aim collectively to problematize and contest Eurocentric approaches to the study of neoliberalism, while also investigating the role under neoliberalism of NGOs, IGOs, corporations and state institutions. We hope to foster a comparative and interdisciplinary dialogue to reassess both how neoliberalisms function as practices in the contemporary world, and what limitations the overall framework of neoliberalism may pose for the analysis of contemporary transformations of social life. We consider questions concerning the privatization of public goods, international investment and development programs, the dissemination of norms of entrepreneurship, the role of experts in development projects, micro-lending, and the effects of such developments on “public culture,” sexual and gender norms, and kinship structures.

Introduction: William Callison, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, UC Berkeley. More information can be found at criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Globalizing Neoliberalism(s)? | Julia Elyachar | 10/8/14

In this meeting we discuss the potential uses and limitations of Marxist approaches to the contemporary theorization and study of neoliberal capitalism. While some have described neoliberalism as a modification in the mode of production, entailing new ideological categories and a retrenchment of class power, others have emphasized its non-unified character and its unique forms of governmentality, which have reconfigured relations between the state, economy, and citizen-subjects. This session hopes to engage and think with Marxist traditions by asking which central insights remain essential to account for neoliberal capitalism–from surplus value and capital accumulation to commodification and fetishism–and whether new analytical tools are required to grasp changes in contemporary capitalist power relations. This interdisciplinary dialogue may consider the distinctive elements of neoliberalism such as financialization, human capital, economization, and entrepreneurialism.

Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California Berkeley, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Rhetoric and interdisciplinary graduate program in Critical Theory. A scholar of historical and contemporary political theory, her most recent books are Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010), The Power of Tolerance (with Rainer Forst, 2013), and Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015).

Michael Burawoy has studied industrial workplaces in different parts of the world — Zambia, Chicago, Hungary and Russia — through participant observation. Throughout his career he has engaged with Marxism, seeking to reconstruct it in the light of his research and more broadly in the light of historical challenges of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Colleen Lye is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley. She is the author of America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton University Press, 2005), a study of the making of “Asiatic racial form” through the interactions of naturalist literature and U.S. policy in an era of U.S. expansion across the Pacific. Currently she is working on a new project on Asian American literary formation after the 1960s and its relationship to the globalization of knowledge economies.

Richard Walker’s research is focused on economic geography, regional development, capitalism and politics, cities and urbanism, resources and environment, California, class and race. Professor Walker’s best known work is in economic geography, especially The Capitalist Imperative: Territory, Technology and Industrial Growth (Blackwell, 1989), with Michael Storper – one of the most cited books in the field.

Introduction: William Callison, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, UC Berkeley. More information can be found at criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Neoliberalism and Marxist... | Brown, Burawoy, Lye, Walker | 11/12/14

The first full critical biography of Benjamin in any language, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Harvard 2014) is the capstone of a twenty-year collaboration between scholars Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings on Walter Benjamin’s life, work, and critical legacy. The Program in Critical Theory brings them together with Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters for a discussion of the book’s implications for Benjamin scholarship. Critical Theory co-director Martin Jay moderates a conversation on the genesis of the project and the possibility of writing a “Benjaminian” biography.

Introduction: Robert Kaufman, Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley

On Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life | Howard Eiland | 11/4/14

All The TIme (SLowed Down)

LordxKing’s style on modern hip-hop is changing the game with a bold, new look on the rap genre. Mercurial Love tells the story of a break down in the mind, the mind being fleeting and quick to change when faced with a heavy burden. Songs like “Money Mouth Prod TayMasterChef” tells the tale of how the narrator needs materials (drugs, money, women) to be satisfied, hoping that it can alleviate the emotional pain hidden deep inside; something that is totally relatable in today’s society. Mercurial Love goes through the stages of being unsure of what to get out of life, to experimenting on what would make one happy, to be in deep brooding, to being thankful for the journey and lessons being taught, that learning was a struggle, but it was a life lesson worth learning. 

LordxKing explains how love is always an escapable manifestation; “Sometimes you want women, sometimes you want money, you can love a lot of things but nothing ever stays the same. Love is mercurial.” In his music, he expresses how love is not just romantic. This album really touches on false powers, friends, evils - many things, to him, that are a contrary subject, but wanted to explore the possibility of. LordxKing hopes the listener will comprehend that he isn’t one dimensional, will understand that he is not perfect, but, however, promise that he is a thinker. 

“I want you, the listener, to at least have one question for yourself when the final song is over. I want you to ask yourself if you believe love to be mercurial as well.” 

Natalie Silva

01 C ON BOTH SIDES w Frank Ocean

Zombie

Panelists from UC Berkeley, Laney College, and Cornell University will include Dan Blanton, Arturo Dávila Sánchez, Catherine Flynn, Robert Kaufman, Francine Masiello, Natalie Melas, Miryam Sas, and Nathaniel Wolfson.

This afternoon symposium and discussion—organized by UC Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory—will feature two panels of literary and cultural critics who will reconsider surrealism: its histories, its afterlives, and its resonances in art and politics today. Participants will offer brief presentations that rethink the work of surrealist and surrealist-influenced art in Europe; in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Americas; and in North Africa. The symposium will also involve extensive discussion among the panelists and audience.

Presented by University of California, Berkeley’s Consortium on Surrealism @100 (organized by UC Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory). This event is co-sponsored with City Lights Booksellers and Publishers and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

[Session 2] Surrealism Then, Now: Snapshots of Critically Engaged Art | Panel | 11/16/19

Etienne Balibar will reflect on his relationship to reading Marx, starting with Reading Capital, his early work co-written with Louis Althusser. He will seek to reconstruct his relation to Marx’s thought, communism, and engage the question of communism for the present and future.

Etienne Balibar teaches at Columbia every Fall semester. He is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Université de Paris X – Nanterre and Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He also holds a part-time Anniversary Chair in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He has published widely in the areas of epistemology, Marxist philosophy, and moral and political philosophy in general. His works include Lire le Capital (with Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Jacques Rancière, Roger Establet) (1965); The Philosophy of Marx (1995); Spinoza and politics (1998); Politics and the Other Scene (2002); We, the People of Europe? (2003) ; Equaliberty (2014); Violence and Civility. On the Limits of Political Philosophy (2015); Citizen Subject. Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology (2017); Secularism and Cosmopolitanism (2018).

This event is co-sponsored by the Program in Critical Theory and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Being Communist, Becoming Other | Etienne Balibar | 11/25/19

The Program in Critical Theory & City Lights Books, San Francisco, present a talk by Howard Eiland, “Hamlet as Trauerspiel?”

Origin of the German Trauerspiel was Walter Benjamin’s first full, historically-oriented analysis of modernity. Readers of English knew it until last year under the title The Origin of German Tragic Drama, but in fact the subject is something else: the play of mourning. Howard Eiland’s completely new English translation and introduction (Harvard University Press, 2019), the first to appear since 1977, is closer to the German text and more consistent with Benjamin’s philosophical idiom.

Focusing on the extravagant and historical seventeenth-century theatrical genre of the trauerspiel, precursor of the opera, Benjamin identifies allegory as the constitutive trope of the Baroque and of modernity itself. Allegorical perception bespeaks a world of mutability and equivocation, a melancholy sense of eternal transience without access to the transcendentals of the medieval mystery plays—though no less haunted and bedeviled, and no less susceptible to momentary apotheosis. History as trauerspiel—as shaped by the base machination of schemers—is in Benjamin’s account the condition as well as subject of modern allegory in its inscription of the abyssal, or ever-increasing, apparently incomprehensible, layers of depth, experience, and interpretive questions.

Benjamin’s investigation of the trauerspiel includes German texts and late Renaissance European drama such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Calderón’s Life Is a Dream. The book’s Prologue is one of Benjamin’s most important and difficult pieces of writing. It sets forth his method of indirection and his idea of the “constellation” (which would become crucial to thinkers across several generations of the Frankfurt School, as well to other critics, philosophers, theorists, and artists) as a key means of grasping the world, of constructing dynamic unities from the myriad bits of daily life and historical materials. Thoroughly annotated with a philological and historical introduction and other explanatory and supplementary material, Eilan’s rigorous and elegant new translation brings fresh understanding to a cardinal work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary critics.

Eiland’s talk “Hamlet as Trauerspiel?” approaches Benjamin’s interpretation of Hamlet—which deems the play a consummate trauerspiel—as a way into the thorny interior of the trauerspiel book itself.  Benjamin presents the theory of the trauerspiel as containing  “prolegomena” to the interpretation of Shakespearean “tragedy” (Benjamin faults critics for their “loose usage” of the term “tragedy”), and to the interpretation of Hamlet in particular. Eiland examines Benjamin’s claims for decisive historical and formal-stylistic differences between the genres of tragedy and trauerspiel—the former based in pagan myth and cult, the latter in Judeo-Christian history and spectacle; the former embedded in dialogue, the latter in the Dingwelt—and Eiland then briefly traces these distinctions back through the German critical-philological tradition, to Herder and A.W. Schlegel. Eiland focuses, first, on the philosophical-historical “antinomies of allegoresis” that structure the trauerspiel world, and then on Benjamin’s discussion of the enigmatic themes of “fate” and “play.” These issues are all reflected and crystallized in Hamlet‘s death scene, which Benjamin here presents—in its “vehement externality,” its crucial reliance on props and its profusion of corpses, as well as in its hint of apotheosis—as typical of the trauerspiel. All of which leads Benjamin to conclude that Hamlet’s death is definitely not tragic. Eiland takes issue with this last assessment, arguing for the prince as a tragic hero of recognition and remembrance.

Walter Benjamin on William Shakespeare: "Hamlet as Trauerspiel?" | Howard Eiland | 2/10/20

The Program in Critical Theory & City Lights Books, San Francisco, present a panel-and-audience discussion with Howard Eiland: “On Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel.”

A panel of UC Berkeley faculty including Catherine Flynn (English; Irish Studies; Critical Theory), Niklaus Largier (German; Comparative Literature; Critical Theory), and Jeffrey Knapp (English; Film and Media) will speak with Eiland about Benjamin’s book, including issues involving Eiland’s new translation of and introduction to the text, as well as those raised by Eiland’s Monday, February 10 talk, “Hamlet as Trauerspiel?”. The panel will then open things up by inviting questions and discussion from the audience.

Howard Eiland taught literature for several decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is co-editor, translator, and author in the ongoing Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings series from Harvard University Press.  The many volumes in the series that he’s translated, edited, and/or co-authored include The Arcades Project (2002); Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (2014); and, most recently, the new translation of and introduction to Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel (2019).

On Walter Benjamin's Origin of the German Trauerspiel | Howard Eiland | 2/11/20

The Program in Critical Theory & City Lights Books, SF, Present a Seminar/Discussion with Howard Eiland on his recently published book: Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019).

Howard Eiland’s Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) is a highly erudite and courageous inquiry into the arts. Weaving through a host of “classic” texts—literary, cinematic, and musical—these notes of a virtouso close reader set up echoes and reflections across signature moments. These “notes” address a dissident force in art while discussing an impressively diverse range of works and ideas in literature, film, and jazz. For instance: Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Jane Austen mix with Dickens and Kafka; Carl Dreyer intersects with Mizoguchi, Bresson, Lynch, and Madden; Eric Dolphy and Cecil Taylor process Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. In a quasi-musical way, Notes interweaves elements within and between works—elements that open onto the unknown in an utterly questioning and self-questioning way. Eiland’s eloquent writing itself exemplifies this “aesthetic,” if it may be called that; the writing is enthralling in its capacity to challenge both the works examined and those who would assess them. Notes focuses on those energies in art that enact image spaces and spatiotemporal alterations in which life is never quite what it seems to be. This extraordinarily original book will interest all concerned with broad implications of developments in literature, film, and jazz.

Eiland will be joined in conversation by two jazz pianists and UC Berkeley literary critics: Michael Lucey (French; Comparative Literature; Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality; Program in Critical Theory) and Maya Kronfeld (Comparative Literature).

Eiland will read briefly from and discuss the book. For those wishing to attend the seminar/discussion, please email critical_theory@berkeley.edu to receive excerpts from the book.

Howard Eiland taught literature for several decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is co-editor, translator, and author in the ongoing Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings series from Harvard University Press. The many volumes in the series that he’s translated, edited, and/or co-authored include The Arcades Project (2002); Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (2014); and, most recently, the new translation of and introduction to Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel (2019). Eiland has also worked for decades as a critic writing on literature, film, and jazz; Notes contains a sampling from among the most acute of these critical pieces.

This event is co-sponsored by the Program in Critical Theory and City Lights Booksellers and Publishers.

Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz | Howard Eiland | 2/12/20

The Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) was established in 2013 by UC Berkeley’s College of Letters and Sciences: Division of Arts and Humanities with a mission to support the programming and development of several dynamic interdisciplinary research units in the humanities and social sciences.

Currently CICI serves The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, The Program in Critical Theory, and the Digital Humanities at Berkeley, three programs led by a highly diverse community of 200 faculty, advisors, scholars and graduate students from nearly 30 campus departments and schools.