Critical Theory - UC Berkeley

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

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 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

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

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.

Critical Theory - UC Berkeley

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