Approaches to Critical Theory
©️ Omnia El Shakry
Description
This course will introduce students to some of the key approaches in modern and contemporary critical theory. Rather than provide a comprehensive survey, the course will pair canonical texts with critical departures and reworkings by later theorists. We will read across multiple traditions such as German idealism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, feminism, Subaltern studies, and Black studies. Readings include: GWF Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Louis Althusser, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Achille Mbembe, Luce Irigaray, Hortense Spillers, Judith Butler, Walter Benjamin, Gayatri Spivak, Frank Wilderson, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.
Topics will include: subject formation (recognition, perception, ressentiment, the unconscious, aggression, interpellation); value (labor, commodity, and capital); the transvaluation of values; ideology and the critique of ideology; the phenomenology of race; bodies and materiality; biopolitics and necropolitics; the subaltern and the unthought; and the undercommons. Our readings will be available on Canvas, in order to ensure that we are reading the same translations.
Schedule of Readings
Week I: Introduction
Week II: Recognition
G.W.F. Hegel, “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness,” in Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1807]1977), pp. 111–119.
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Basic Books, 1969), pp. 1–70.
Frantz Fanon, “The Negro and Recognition,” in Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles Markmann (New York: Grove Press, [1952]1967), pp. 210–222.
Week III: Value
Karl Marx, The Economic Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. “Estranged Labor,” “Private Property and Communism,” and “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society.”
_____, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” Das Kapital, Volume I (New York [1867] 1967), vol. 1, chapter 1, Section 4.
_____, “Part VIII: Primitive Accumulation,” Das Kapital, Volume I (New York [1867] 1967), chapters 26–27, 31–32.
Week IV: Genealogy
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, [1887]1967), pp. 15–96.
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. and Sherry Simon Bouchard, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, [1971]1977), pp. 139–164.
Week V: Unconscious
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey, (London: Hogarth Press, [1900]1971), Volumes IV–V, Chapters II-VII; with special attention to Ch. IV, VI, VII.
Week VI: Aggression
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” (1949) and “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis” (1948) in Écrits: A Selection, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), pp. 3–30.
Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” in Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles Markmann (New York: Grove Press, [1952]1967), pp. 109–140, 161–164n25.
Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in The Location of Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 66–84, esp. II–II.
Week VII: Ideology
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127-186.
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 1-53.
Jacques Derrida, “What is Ideology” in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London, 1993).
Week VIII: Politics
Michel Foucault, “Spectacle of the Scaffold”; “Panopticism” in Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage [1975] 1977), pp. 32–69; 195–228.
_____, “Truth and Power” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 109–133.
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 (1): 2003.
Week IX: Bodies
Luce Irigaray, “This Sex which is not One”; “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine”; “Women on the Market” in This Sex which is not One, translated by Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press [1977] 1985), pp. 23–33, 68–85, 170–191.
Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1987): 64-81.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. vii–34.
_____, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. ix–23.
Week X: Unthought
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations trans. by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253-264.
Gayatrai Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
Frank Wilderson III, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities 9, no. 2 (2003): 225–240.
Week XI: Undercommons
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Autonomedia 2013), pp. 1-99.
David Marriott, “Foreword” in Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), pp. ix–xix.