Critical Theory

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi examines Foucault’s writings on the Iranian Revolution as an attempt to write the history of the present without binding commitments to a teleological historiography. Is it possible for a people to envision and desire futures uncharted by already existing schemata of history? Is it possible to think of dignity, justice, and liberty outside the cognitive maps and principles of the Enlightenment? Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that Foucault’s encounter with the Iranian revolution left a significant mark on his later works on the care of the self and the hermeneutics of the subject.

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Islam and Dissent in Postrevolutionary Iran (I.B. Tauris & Palgrave-MacMillan, 2008), Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution (OR Books & Counterpoint Press, 2016), and Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Foucault’s Enlightenment: Islamic Revolution and the Perils... | Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi | 10/19/17

Among the strong patterns of the post-1980s period in “Western” societies is a mix of economic and political vectors marked by extractive logics. We can find such extractive logics in entities as diverse as mining and Facebook. The rise of such extractive logics is partial, but sufficiently powerful to have altered key features of our economies and societies. For instance, when mass consumption is the shaping sector of our economies (until about the 1980s) even the nastiest corporation wanted the sons and daughters to do better than their parents so they would consume more — and supported government initiatives that transferred money to households directly and indirectly. This began to change with the privatizations, deregulations, and the rise of finance/financialization in the 1980s. One way of putting it is to emphasize the extractive character of leading economic sectors. How did Google make its first billion so fast and so unencumbered by all kinds of traditional constraints? It got information about all of us for free and then sold it to businesses. I want to argue that these are all instances of the rise of extractive logic. I will focus especially on finance and its sharp differences from traditional banking (which was/is basically commerce: it sells something (money) for a price. A second aspect I want to emphasize is the extent to which our major categories of analysis do not help us track the trajectories of that which is expelled. To a large extent these categories were developed at a time when mass consumption was dominant and more and more people and households became part of that mass consumption logic. But since the 1980s this dominance of mass consumption has been weakening and other logics have become dominant. One instance of the latter is the financializing of a rapidly growing range of material and immaterial elements in our political economies. Elsewhere I have developed the notion of expulsions into a category for analysis (Expulsions, Harvard University Press/Belknap).

Saskia Sassen is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, where she is also a Member of the Committee on Global Thought. Her new book is Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press 2014). Recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2008), A Sociology of Globalization (W.W.Norton 2007), and the 4th fully updated edition of Cities in a World Economy (Sage 2012). Among older books are The Global City (Princeton University Press 1991/2001), and Guests and Aliens (New Press 1999). Her books are translated into over 20 languages. She is the recipient of diverse awards and mentions, including multiple doctor honoris causa, named lectures, and being selected as one of the top global thinkers on diverse lists. Most recently she was awarded the Principe de Asturias 2013 Prize in the Social Sciences and made a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Rise of Extractive Logics | Saskia Sassen | 3/13/18

Saskia Sassen answers follow-up questions to her lecture titled “The Rise of Extractive Logics,“ which you can find here: https://soundcloud.com/cirucberkeley/the-rise-of-extractive-logics-sassen-31318

Among the strong patterns of the post-1980s period in “Western” societies is a mix of economic and political vectors marked by extractive logics. We can find such extractive logics in entities as diverse as mining and Facebook. The rise of such extractive logics is partial, but sufficiently powerful to have altered key features of our economies and societies. For instance, when mass consumption is the shaping sector of our economies (until about the 1980s) even the nastiest corporation wanted the sons and daughters to do better than their parents so they would consume more — and supported government initiatives that transferred money to households directly and indirectly. This began to change with the privatizations, deregulations, and the rise of finance/financialization in the 1980s. One way of putting it is to emphasize the extractive character of leading economic sectors. How did Google make its first billion so fast and so unencumbered by all kinds of traditional constraints? It got information about all of us for free and then sold it to businesses. I want to argue that these are all instances of the rise of extractive logic. I will focus especially on finance and its sharp differences from traditional banking (which was/is basically commerce: it sells something (money) for a price. A second aspect I want to emphasize is the extent to which our major categories of analysis do not help us track the trajectories of that which is expelled. To a large extent these categories were developed at a time when mass consumption was dominant and more and more people and households became part of that mass consumption logic. But since the 1980s this dominance of mass consumption has been weakening and other logics have become dominant. One instance of the latter is the financializing of a rapidly growing range of material and immaterial elements in our political economies. Elsewhere I have developed the notion of expulsions into a category for analysis (Expulsions, Harvard University Press/Belknap).

Saskia Sassen is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, where she is also a Member of the Committee on Global Thought. Her new book is Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press 2014). Recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2008), A Sociology of Globalization (W.W.Norton 2007), and the 4th fully updated edition of Cities in a World Economy (Sage 2012). Among older books are The Global City (Princeton University Press 1991/2001), and Guests and Aliens (New Press 1999). Her books are translated into over 20 languages. She is the recipient of diverse awards and mentions, including multiple doctor honoris causa, named lectures, and being selected as one of the top global thinkers on diverse lists. Most recently she was awarded the Principe de Asturias 2013 Prize in the Social Sciences and made a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Graduate Student Session: Saskia Sassen Answers Follow-Up Questions to her Lecture | 3/13/18

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

What makes a political theory a critical theory of politics? What critical theory of politics responds best to the particular challenges of our times? Drawing on a conception of critical theory indebted to the Frankfurt School tradition of theorizing, but integrating new impulses from outside it, I identify the salient features of a critical theory of politics. Using this general account as a frame, I propose a particular theory designed to fit contemporary democracies in which there is a plurality of values and corresponding modes of behaviour and practices. Non-authoritarian authority is at the centre of my critical theory of politics, partly because it is a key factor, determining how we think of important concerns such as human well-being, ecological sustainability and global justice, and partly because of the current global upsurge in democratic support for authoritarian political regimes. Authoritarian forms of power undermine individual freedom because they impose ways of thinking and acting on their subjects, bypassing their rational agency. By contrast, non- authoritarian, yet authoritative forms of power foster individual freedom by offering their subjects ethical orientation in their endeavours to lead lives for which they can take rational responsibility. Underlying my argument is a conceptualization of the idea of individual human freedom as a maturational process involving interactions between human subjects in relation to the validity of their particular ethical values. Its full development is shown to require non-authoritarian, yet authoritative social institutions.

Professor Maeve Cooke is Professor of Philosophy at UCD School of Philosophy and a member of the Royal Irish Academy, as well as a visiting scholar in the Program in Critical Theory for the 2017-2018 school year. Her books include Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (MIT Press 1994) and Re-Presenting the Good Society (MIT Press 2006). She has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and edited collections and has delivered hundreds of papers to academic audiences throughout the world. Her work has been translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Czech and Chinese. She is a regular contributor to public discussions in Ireland. She has held visiting appointments at leading universities in Germany and the USA and is the recipient of multiple prestigious research fellowships and awards. She sits on the editorial boards of a number of scholarly journals and is a co-director of the international colloquium “Philosophy and the Social Sciences,” which meets annually in Prague.

Non-authoritarian Authority: A Critical Theory of Politics for Our Times | Maeve Cooke | 4/16/18

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

This talk is part of the Department of Rhetoric’s Fall Colloquium.

It’s hot and it’s getting hotter. As the machinery of capital extraction, industrialism, and consumption refuses to relinquish its grip, temperatures continue to rise and chemical hot zones to spread. Tipping points threaten to alter the nature of what the ecologists of the 70s came to describe as the whole earth, gaia, the biosphere. But until that happens, and even after, the shifts are not and will never be uniform. In reality, hot zones form like rain clouds over specific vicinities. And clouds are part of a global circulation of forms of toxicity. In the broad shadow of these toxic formations four broad axioms of existence now characterize an increasingly large segment of critical theory: the extimacy of existence; the distribution of the effects of power and the power to affect a given terrain of existence; the multiplicity and collapse of forms of the event; and the collapse of western disciplines of embodied distinctions and hierarchies, or, what I have called the collapse of western geontopower. This talk explores the political demands these axioms make and the rhetorical dodges taken to avoid their radical implications.

Cori Hayden, Associate Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley, will be the discussant for this talk.

On October 26, as part of the Rhetoric Fall Colloquim, Professor Povinelli will present a screening of the Karrabing Film Collective’s The Mermaids, or Aiden through Wonderland. Please see here for details.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her books include Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016), Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (2011), and The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (2002). She is also a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective.

Sponsored by the Department of Rhetoric. Co-sponsored by the Department of Geography, the Department of Anthropology, the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the Program in Critical Theory.

The Four Axioms of Existence | Elizabeth A. Povinelli | 10/25/18

Why should we pursue a critical theory of democratic protest? Assuming that we should, what would such a critical theory look like today? My paper considers both questions, offering some partial answers. On my understanding, critical theory addresses normative questions relating to the good life for humans, to the kind of society that would enable a good life, and to protest as a means for the social transformation required for this purpose. I see the modern democratic project—currently under threat—as one important vision of the good life in a good society. Focusing on civil disobedience as a form of democratic protest, I argue for an account of social transformation that is intimately linked to ethical self-transformation. This places me at odds with most contemporary configurations of critical theory, in which the connection between social transformation and self-transformation is dismissed or neglected. Though social transformation is the point of the protest, I claim that radical social transformation often calls for radical ethical self-transformation. The challenge here for critical theories is a double one. The theory must offer an account of ethical self-transformation that is normatively robust, in the sense of permitting evaluative discrimination between ethically good and ethically bad kinds of self-transformation. At the same time, the theory must be non-authoritarian, in the sense that it may not determine in advance what counts as ethically valid self-transformation, independent of the reflective experiences of the human individuals concerned; for this, a non-authoritarian conception of ethical validity (“ethical truth”) is required.

Maeve Cooke is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Her current research interests centre on the relation between freedom and authority, and on related questions of protest, resistance and violence. Her next project will be a critical theory of the Anthropocene. She has published two monographs in critical social theory: Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (MIT Press, 1994) and Re-Presenting the Good Society (MIT Press, 2006) and is the author of many articles in the areas of social and political philosophy. She is on the editorial board of a number of scholarly journals, and has held visiting appointments at universities in the USA and Europe.

Co-sponsored by The Institute of European Studies (IES).

Radical Transformations of Self and Society... | Maeve Cooke | 11/14/18

A central concept in Foucault’s later work is Askesis: an exercise of oneself, related to self-mastery and self-transformation. The concept of “ascetic schooling” in the foreword to Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel has a similarly significant role, much neglected by scholarship. Both Foucault’s askesis and Benjamin’s “ascetic schooling” relate to the transformation of the subject through arduous work as fundamental for philosophy. At the same time, their considerations of askesis/asceticism illuminate the complex relations between the different models of critique they promote – the reactivation of an attitude alien to doctrine and tradition (Foucault), versus a change of attitude as propaedeutic for their presentation (Benjamin). 

Ori Rotlevy is a postdoctoral fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He teaches philosophy in Tel Aviv University, where he also co-directs a research group in the Minerva Humanities Center on “Tradition: Transmission, Canon and Critique”.

Askesis, Critique, and Tradition: Foucault and Benjamin | Ori Rotlevy | 9/23/19

Neoliberal thinkers developed numerous agendas for the reform of—most notably—democracy and the state. But what is the neoliberal view of politics and, especially, the kind of politics that would bring about these reforms? This is the main question that the talk seeks to address; it does so in three sections. The starting point is a theoretical and historical conceptualization of neoliberalism, one that argues that the common denominator of neoliberal thought is what can be called “the neoliberal problematic” (in which the problem of democracy figures prominently). The talk’s second movement provides an overview of specific critical diagnoses and reform proposals offered by neoliberals with regard to “actually existing democracy” and its diagnosed ills. The talk’s final section focuses on the politics of neoliberalism and reconstructs the view of politics contained—albeit often implicitly—in neoliberal thought. The talk will show that neoliberals faced massive challenges in providing a plausible pathway towards liberal reforms consistent with their own assumptions underlying their critical analyses of the status quo.

Finally, the talk presents two broad conclusions. First, that neoliberal thought is caught in a dilemma: either it sticks to its critiques but consequently is unable to develop a consistent reform strategy, or it sticks to the possibility of implementing its reform plans and is thus forced to discard the assumptions informing its analytical framework. The concluding section also contends that the politics of neoliberalism as a politics of the extraordinary provides the systematic link between neoliberalism and what today is typically called “populism.” That is, populism does not— as has often been alleged—spell the end of neoliberalism: it is at the least neoliberalism’s complement, if not its completion.

Thomas Biebricher studied political science, economics and public law at the Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg and Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. After graduating in 2000, he earned his doctorate in 2003 in Freiburg with a dissertation titled “The Self-critique of Modernity: Habermas and Foucault in Comparison” published by Campus Verlag in 2005. From 2003 to 2009 he worked as a DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Florida, Gainesville. From 2009 to 2012 he headed a junior research group at the Cluster of Excellence at Goethe-University Frankfurt on the subject of “Crisis and Normative Order – Variations of Neoliberalism and its Transformation.” In 2012 and 2013 he represented the chairs of Political Theory and Philosophy as well as International Political Theory at the Cluster of Excellence. In Winter Term 2014, he was DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute for European Studies of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. From 2014 to 2017, he was the Chair of Political Theory and Philosophy at Goethe University. Presently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Cluster of Excellence. He is the author of The Political Theory of Neoliberalism (Stanford University Press, 2019).

Co-sponsored by Political Economy Program, Department of Political Science and the Program in Critical Theory.

The Problem of Democracy and the Politics of Neoliberalism | Thomas Biebricher | 10/8/19

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

[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 theoretical project of world literature reorients reading in part through a scalar oscillation across the space-time fabric of literary history (old texts and new texts, familiar texts and unfamiliar texts, texts that traverse the locales of the national, the regional, the local, and the global). This talk explores the connections between world-scale concerns, particularly the legacies of racialized violence, and world-scale forms. The latter include world-systems and genres, both staples of world literature theory, but also encompass the forms of the affects and the shapes or scapes of memory. Exploring system, genre, affect, and memory as scalar units and nation, region, continent, and world as distinct sites, this talk models a reading practice for world literature.

Vilashini Cooppan is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (2009). Her essays on postcolonial and world literatures, globalization theory, psychoanalysis, nationalism, memory studies, and affect theory have appeared in symploké, Comparative Literature Studies, Gramma, Concentric, PMLA, Qui Parle, and several edited volumes, including Trauma and Memory in the Contemporary South African Novel, The Routledge Companion to World Literature, The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, and The Cambridge Companion to World Literature.  She is completing a book titled The World at Large: Memoryscapes in World Literature.

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

Scaling the World: Memoryscape as Method | Vilashani Cooppan | 9/17/19

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.