2020 Session | Seminars & Mini-Seminars
Six-Week Seminars
Magic
Matthew Engelke
Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, Columbia University
This seminar focuses on the cultural history of magic: as an idea, as a practice, and as a tool with which to wield power and induce wonder. Special attention is given to magic and/in modernity against larger backdrops of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, (post) colonialism, and (post) secularism. Readings are drawn from philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, drama, literary studies, history, sociology, history of science, and political theory. Cases will include colonial Sudan, Reformation England, Thatcher-era London, France (from the Second Empire to the fin de siècle), Puritan Salem, and post-Apartheid South Africa.
Formalist Methods, Political Consequences
Caroline Levine
David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of the Humanities and Picket Family Chair of the English Department, Cornell University
Since the 1970s, political critics have tended to cast formalist analysis as the opponent of engaged politics, and they have rejected the abstractions of form in favor of singularity, rupture and deformation. In this seminar, we will consider major traditions of formalist thought—including Kantian and Marxist formalism—and we will ask how formalist methods might serve political ends. Focusing specifically on our own historical moment, characterized as it is by global precarity and climate instability, we will ask how the stabilizing power of forms might actually be a useful instrument for building projects of environmental and social justice. Is it possible that methods drawn from aesthetic formalism could help us to solve urgent global problems? Our readings will include formalist and antiformalist thinkers, including Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, bell hooks, Derek Attridge, Jacques Rancière, Kyle Powys Whyte, Rob Nixon, Jose Muñoz, Anna Tsing, Jack Halberstam, Anna Kornbluh, Zarena Aslami, Susan Fraiman, Fred Moten, and Anahid Nersessian.
Epistemology of the Archive and the Practice of Archival History
Marina Rustow
Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Professor of History, Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East, Director of the Geniza Lab and Director of the Near East Program, Princeton University
At the center of the historian’s craft lies the archive: a physical place, a collection of textual artifacts, a metaphor for access to the unknown. The experience of labor in the archive, in the dust, is a rite of passage for the historian no less than fieldwork for the ethnographer, laboratory experiments for the scientist, or summer stock theater for the actor. For critical theorists, by contrast, the archive is not a mere repository of knowledge, but the sum total of knowledge itself; the “archive” defines the boundaries of the thinkable. Those different disciplinary notions bespeak divergent epistemological assumptions: the historian cannot work without some functional notion of the facts, while the critical theorist must question their very existence. But both disciplines agree that archives are products of power. That will be our starting point in this seminar, in which non-historians and historians alike are welcome to participate.
After orienting ourselves to critical theory’s engagement with the archive (Foucault, Derrida, Agamben), our goal will be to restore to the archive the dimensions of time, space, and human agency by understanding its place in well-defined contexts, including premodern polities, colonial empires and nascent nation-states, from ancient Assyria through modern China, with medieval monks, colonial bureaucrats, Ottoman dragomans and Napoleonic deconsecrations in between. Archives have histories, as do the set of practices that historians have built for using them. But once we bathe them in the solvent of historical contingency, will the archive lose or retain its status as a repository of reliable information, or its utility as a metaphor for regimes of truth? What can a deep, insider’s understanding of the historian’s craft add to the toolkit of humanists and social scientists alike?
Whiteness and the Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment
George Yancy
Professor of Philosophy, Emory University; Montgomery Fellow, Dartmouth College
This seminar is designed to engage critically some of the lived and structural dynamics of whiteness. In this regard, we will explore the social construction of whiteness and its ontological binary structure, its hegemony, purity, privilege, and complicity. Our objective is to think about how whiteness is lived and the ways in which it is embodied, spatial, and constitutes a site of psychic opacity and a site of institutional embeddedness. These explorations will help us to think critically about how we define white racism and what it means to be white. This raises questions regarding the ontology of the self as atomic, relational, etc. We will explore how various ways of being philosophically wedded to assumptions about the “nature” of the self frame, productively or not, implications for rethinking and theorizing the dynamics of how we understand racial embodiment. As a way of conceptualizing whiteness as lived, we will explore whiteness through the lens of critical phenomenology, African American philosophy, feminist theory, pedagogy, and through the works of various literary figures (for example, Lillian Smith, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison). Our objective is to think hard about questions of vulnerability, innocence, and complicity as these relate to whiteness. Hence, we will take the dialectics of theory and praxis very seriously.
Mini-Seminars
Infinity, Nothingness, and the Un/doing of Self
Karen Barad
Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz
description coming soon!
Mystical Modernity: Reading Walter Benjamin Through Ali Shariati
Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Professor of Near Eastern Studies and
Director of the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gold Studies, Princeton University
description coming soon!
Persons and the Unity of Mind
Béatrice Longuenesse
Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver and Enid Silver Winslow Professor of Philosophy, New York University
description coming soon!
Humanists in the Future of Evolutionary Science
Gary Tomlinson
John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and Humanities and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University
Why should humanists care about human evolution? And why should evolutionists care that they care? The present moment finds posthumanist agendas broadly and deeply developed in the humanities, and an “extended evolutionary synthesis,” augmenting neo-Darwinian theories of the twentieth century in bold ways, gripping biology. From the posthumanist side, questions of transspecies experience and community are grounded in theories of process, assemblage, and transhuman agency. From the biological side, novel or repurposed views of informational processes, autopoietic systems, and feedback networks expand the conceivable dynamics through which life forms evolved. A new juncture of posthumanist transspeciesism and extended evolutionary dynamics is coming into view, with new opportunities for humanist/scientist joint thought.
This seminar will examine some aspects of this new juncture, particularly as it applies to the late stages of human evolution, thus revealing affinities of posthumanism and prehumanism. It will take up models that biologists have offered of the new evolutionary dynamics; it will join to them bodies of humanist theory (especially neo-Peircean semiotics); and it will explore, with the example of human musical capacities in mind, a new view of the emergence of our modernity. Along the way it will address pitfalls that have waylaid human-evolutionary discourse in recent years: the simplistic adaptationism of evolutionary psychology and the misapprehension of culture among gene-centrists. And it will counter gene-deterministic views of cultural traits and show that these are not the only explanations for universal capacities of humans and other cultural animals.
Visiting Guest Lecturers
My Passage to India and Nepal: a Philosopher’s Journey
Anita Allen
Vice Provost for Faculty and Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania
From the Outside Looking In
Heather Love
Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
Revisiting the Case Against Reparation
Carolyn Rouse
Professor and Chair of Anthropology, Princeton University
Other Cosmopolitans, China and Beyond
Haiping Yan
Professor of Cross-Cultural Studies and Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China