Lectures

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CIR/UC Berkeley

In his analysis of two contemporary forms of violence – the death-penalty and the violent exploitation of animals – Jacques Derrida showed how deeply rooted their conceptual bases are within contemporary institutions and practices. Moreover, his analyses showed the extent to which many of the discourses which claim to oppose them are caught up in the very conceptual space which sustains the forms of violence they purport to contest. In this talk, I focus on one of the resources Derrida’s own work offers for grappling with this difficulty. Tracking the octopus which appears in one of Derrida’s texts, I sketch the long history of this creature and explore the clues it provides as to alternative models of rationality and possible modes of resistance. (Custer)

Olivia Custer completed her Doctorat d’Université at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, working on Kant’s critical philosophy under the supervision of Jacques Derrida. Her research interests revolve around the question of how to engage Kant’s philosophical legacy. She is the author of L’Exemple de Kant (Peeters, 2012), and co-author of Sexualité, Genre et Melancholie, (Campagne Première, Paris, 2009).

Introduction: Judith Butler, Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley

Reading the Hell Out of Derrida: The Octopus | Olivia Custer | 10/23/14

For his lecture “Foucault and Marx: A Disjunctive Synthesis?”, Étienne Balibar discusses connections and disjunctions between Michel Foucault and Karl Marx, using Foucault’s 1972 Collège de France lectures on La société punitive as an alternative lens for the question of “reproduction” and its relationship to class struggles. With Foucault and Marx as a starting point for a new confrontation, he also reconsiders the idea of “communism” today. Response by Judith Butler, Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Foucault and Marx: A Disjunctive Synthesis | Etienne Balibar | 12/9/14

This is the audio recording of Professor Judith Butler's public lecture at trinity College on Thursday February 5th, 2015: Vulnerability and Resistance Revisisted. 

Judith Butler - 'Vulnerability And Resistance Revisited'

A panel discussion with Judith Butler about her book "Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism" (Columbia University Press, 2012).

November 25, 2013
Baltimore, Maryland

Panelists:
Claire Katz, Texas A&M University
Samuel Brody, University of Cincinnati
Yaniv Feller, University of Toronto
Mark Lewis Taylor, Princeton Theological Seminary
Saba Mahmood, University of California, Berkeley
Martin Kavka, Lehigh University
Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley (Responding)
Rebecca Alpert, Temple University (Presiding)

(Audio File: 2 hours, 28 minutes)

Judith Butler's Parting Ways (Columbia University Press, 2012)




Judith Butler Lecture: Cultural Translations of Gender- 2016, California College of the Arts 

Judith Butler Lecture

Often defined as “presentism,” the regime of historicity of the beginning of the twenty-first century posits a kind of perpetual present, absorbing in itself both past and future. It corresponds with a neoliberal ethos that eternizes the current economic order and condemns any form of collective action. It avoids any critical elaboration of the past and promotes its reification (the “realms of memory”), neutralizing at the same time all its potentialities for a recollection oriented towards a political action in the present. Thus, in contrast with the two preceding centuries, which were shaped by the impact of the French and Russian Revolutions, the twenty-first century has begun under the sign of the eclipse of utopias. The disappearance of a visible “horizon of expectation” has generated a charged memory of the past century as a time of violence, totalitarianism and genocide, encapsulated by the image of their victims. The commemorations of May 8, 1945—the anniversary of the end of the Second World War and of the Sétif massacre in Algeria—are the mirror of three main spaces (entangled and not always geographically separated) that define the memory landscape of our global age: a Western space shaped by the remembrance of the Holocaust transformed into a “civil religion” of liberal democracy; an Eastern European space dominated by the legacy of Communism; and a postcolonial space exhuming imperial atrocities (from slavery to colonialism). The common feature of these mnemonic realms is their selective character that, focusing almost exclusively on victims, forgets the vanquished and rejects any idea of collective agency: antifascism, revolution, and anti-imperialism disappear from the history of the last two centuries. Between cultural industry and neoliberal Lebensführung, the legacy of past struggles becomes a kind of Marrano memory.

Enzo Traverso is a historian specializing in contemporary Europe with a focus on intellectual history of the twentieth century in a comparative perspective. He studied at the University of Genoa, Italy, and received his Ph.D. from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1989). He specializes in contemporary Europe, focusing on intellectual history of the twentieth century in a comparative perspective. Before coming to Cornell, he was a professor of political science at the University Jules Verne of Picardy, France, and a member of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). He has also been visiting professor at several European as well as Latin American Universities. His publications include The Origins of Nazi Violence (The New Press, 2003); Fire and Blood: The European Civil War (Verso, 2016); The End of Jewish Modernity: History of a Conservative Turn (Pluto Press, 2016); Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory (Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2016).

Presentism: The Politics of Memory in the Age of Neoliberalism | Enzo Traverso | 9/14/16

Are the analytical tools of the past adequate to identify and assess what we perceive as the revival of fascistic tendencies today? My contention is that most academic and non-academic efforts to denounce contemporary forms of fascism fail to come to terms with the structural roots of the problem. Critical theory has never contented itself with describing surface appearance—and there’s no reason why it should today. If history is valuable for understanding fascism, it is not because it enables us to describe or define what happened, but rather because it allows us to deduce from a specific combination of structures and elements the effects that similar constellations are likely to produce today. This is why I prefer to follow not classical theories of fascism from left to right, but the path opened up by Hannah Arendt’s study of the origins of the totalitarian regimes. Arendt does not fall into the historiographic trap that establishes positivistic causalities. Nor does she overstate the importance of intellectual traditions or ideologies. Her concern is rather with the structural conditions of possibility of total domination. I point out four novel attributes of power that can be detected in Arendt’s study, and that run like a red thread in such a way as to enable us not only to identify fascistic as well as totalitarian trends irrespective of ideological and historiographic differences, but also to criticize them. These attributes, namely limitlessness, self-referentiality, perpetual motion, and the propensity to produce superfluous bodies, while being exacerbated under totalitarian conditions, nevertheless precede them. If we concede that not all totalitarianisms need to be fascist, but that all fascisms tend towards totalitarianism, we have good reason to believe that the typology of power that can be deduced from Arendt’s analysis can help us see what specific features of the present social order made the re-emergence of fascism highly probable. The point is to distill from Arendt’s elaboration of the possible connections between imperialism and totalitarianism various social dispositions that would enable us to see whether the gesture could be repeated today, but this time between neoliberalism and new fascisms.

Zeynep Gambetti is Associate Professor of Political Theory at Boğazici University. She obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Paris VII in 1999. Her work focuses on collective agency, ethics, and public space. She has carried out extensive research on the transformation of the conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdish movement, with particular emphasis on space as a vector of relationality. She collaborated with Joost Jongerden to edit the special issue of The Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies on the spatial dimensions of the Kurdish question in Turkey. She has also published several theoretical articles and book chapters on Hannah Arendt’s political thought and subjectivity, in particular, “The Agent Is the Void! From the Subjected Subject to the Subject of Action,” in Rethinking Marxism (2005), and “Conflict, ‘Commun-ication’ and the Role of Collective Action in the Formation of Public Spheres” in Publics, Politics and Participation: Locating the Public Sphere in the Middle East and North Africa (edited by Seteney Shami, SSRC Publications, 2009). She is the co-editor of Rhetorics of Insecurity: Belonging and Violence in the Neoliberal Era (with Marcial Godoy-Anativia, New York University Press, 2013), The Kurdish issue in Turkey: A Spatial Perspective (with Joost Jongerden, London/New York, Routledge, 2015), and Vulnerability in Resistance: Politics, Feminism, Theory (with Judith Butler and Leticia Sabsay, Duke University Press, 2016).

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

Exploratory Notes on New Fascisms | Zeynep Gambetti | 3/19/18

Speaker(s): Professor Nikolas Rose | This talk considers what it means to approach psychology as a 'social' science in a specific sense - that is to say it sketches out an approach to the analysis of the part that psychology - its languages, techniques, forms of expertise, self-technologies - played across the twentieth century in the development of social-welfare rationalities and technologies of government. Copyright (c) Mon, 5 Feb 2007 18:30:00 GMT

Psychology as Social Science [Audio]

This is the first of three UC Berkeley campus events with Veroónica Gago. She also delivered a lecture and facilitated a seminar while on campus as an ICCTP visiting scholar. 

“Neoliberalism” has become the name for mainstream political economy since 1990: a characterization used by many of this economy’s detractors and sometimes by its proponents. In their work, Wendy Brown and Verónica Gago encourage us to go beyond this popularized understanding, in which neoliberalism is reduced to an economic doctrine of deregulation and austerity. Brown and Gago’s work focuses on the neoliberal regimes’ political implications for the “demos” or democracy. This conversation will engage with neoliberalism in a global frame. Gago’s work focuses on Latin America and draws on a Deleuzian framework, while Brown’s focuses on the Euro-Atlantic world and is informed by a Foucauldian perspective. Taken together, Brown and Gago’s approaches reveal how neoliberalism tends to undo established forms of democratic functioning and organizing from above, while also opening up new democratic spaces and allowing for the emergence of a popular anti-neoliberalism from below.

Verónica Gago, Professor, Instituto de Altos Estudios, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina and Universidad de Buenos Aires, Visiting Scholar, International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, teaches Political Science at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and is Professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Altos Estudios, Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She is also Assistant Researcher at the National Council of Research (CONICET). Gago is the author of Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Tinta Limón 2014, Duke University Press, 2017) and of numerous articles published in journals and books throughout Latin America, Europe and the US. She is a member of the independent radical collective press Tinta Limón. She was part of the militant research experience Colectivo Situaciones, and she is now a member of Ni Una Menos.

Wendy Brown, Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley, works on the history of political theory, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, critical theory and theories of contemporary capitalism.  She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists, Foucault, and contemporary Continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies.  In recent years, her scholarship has focused on neoliberalism and the political formations to which it gives rise.

Co-sponsored by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Verónica Gago and Wendy Brown in Conversation | 9/20/18

This is the second of three UC Berkeley campus events with Verónica Gago. While on campus, she also participated in a conversation with Wendy Brown and hosted a seminar on the International Feminist Strikes of 2017 and 2018.

In Latin America, the meaning of neoliberalism remains contested, and debates on neoliberalism are ongoing. Complicating previous diagnoses, current feminist movements in the region have proposed new definitions grounded in concrete struggles. These have led to a rethinking of neoliberalism from below: an effort to rework the programs introduced by so-called “progressive” governments. The new definitions of neoliberalism have also spurred debates on the horizons of radical possibility open to an anti-neoliberalism produced in and through struggle.

Response by Leslie Salzinger, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, UC Berkeley

Verónica Gago teaches Political Science at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and is Professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Altos Estudios, Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She is also Assistant Researcher at the National Council of Research (CONICET). Gago is the author of Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Tinta Limón 2014, Duke University Press, 2017) and of numerous articles published in journals and books throughout Latin America, Europe and the US. She is a member of the independent radical collective press Tinta Limón. She was part of the militant research experience Colectivo Situaciones, and she is now a member of Ni Una Menos.

Leslie Salzinger is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies. She got her PhD in Sociology at UC Berkeley and previously taught in the sociology departments at the University of Chicago and and Boston College. She is an ethnographer, focused on gender, feminist theory, economic sociology, and neoliberalism. Much of her research has focused on Latin America. Her primary theoretical interests lie in the cultural constitution of economic processes, and in the creation of subjectivities within political economies. Her award-winning first book, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories, analyzed the gendered dimensions of transnational production. Her current work in progress, Model Markets: Peso Dollar Exchange as a Site of Neoliberal Incorporation, analyzes peso/dollar exchange markets as crucial gendered and raced sites for Mexico’s shift from “developing nation” to “emerging market.” Her work on the role of masculinity in the evolution of contemporary global capitalism across sites from both projects is encapsulated in the 2016 essay “Re-Marking Men: Masculinity as a Terrain of the Neoliberal Economy.” In addition to the Sociology Department, Professor Salzinger is affiliated with Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory.

Co-sponsored by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Anti-Neoliberal Feminism: A Reading From Within Present Struggles | Verónica Gago | 9/24/18

This is the last of three UC Berkeley campus event with Verónica Gago, the ICCTP visiting scholar for this academic year. While on campus, she also participated in a conversation with Wendy Brown and delivered a lecture on neoliberalism.

This seminar will take the International Feminist Strikes of 2017 and 2018 as its points of departure and will use the strike as a lens through which to analyze several key questions in contemporary feminist movements. How can we define life and work, and the difference between the two, in feminist terms? What understanding of violence does the strike imply? How can we devise shared plans for collective action? What does it mean to define the strike as a process? As we address these questions, among others, we will work through two main hypotheses. On the one hand, we will seek to understand the function of the strike at a historical moment when the patriarchal wage system is no longer central to the sexual division of labor, and we will consider the role of finance capital. On the other hand, we will ask how the strike is displaced, remains out of place, and in this way renews its political potential.

Verónica Gago teaches Political Science at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and is Professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Altos Estudios, Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She is also Assistant Researcher at the National Council of Research (CONICET). Gago is the author of Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Tinta Limón 2014, Duke University Press, 2017) and of numerous articles published in journals and books throughout Latin America, Europe and the US. She is a member of the independent radical collective press Tinta Limón. She was part of the militant research experience Colectivo Situaciones, and she is now a member of Ni Una Menos.

Co-sponsored by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Feminist Strike as a Practical Research Tool... | Verónica Gago | 9/25/18

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

Howard Gardner, professor at the Harvard Ed School, reflects on his academic "greatest hits" and shares insight on where he does his best thinking.

Howard Gardner's Greatest Hits | Harvard Graduate School of Education

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.