Prof Paulo de Medeiros

Office hours: Tuesdays 17:00-18:00; Wednesdays 13:00-14:00 (H5.26)
Seminar: Tuesday 15:00-17:00 (S0.10)

Module aims: This module aims at providing students with a solid understanding of key elements in critical theory from the original framework of the Frankfurt School to contemporary developments. Students will relate critical theory to social and political issues in historical context in the present. In the process they will develop an understanding for the imbrications of race, gender, and class issues in a theoretical perspective.

Week 1: Introduction. Presentation on “Cruel to be Kin(d)”. Assigned Texts: Theodor W. Adorno. 'Culture Industry Reconsidered' in New German Critique 6(1979) 12-19. Jacques Derrida. “In the Name of the Revolution: the Double Barricade (impure ‘impure impure history of ghosts)”. In Specters of Marx. Routledge, 1994. 118-155.

 

Week 2: Presentation on “Culture Matters”. Assigned Text: Rob Nixon. “Introduction”. In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011. 1-44. Judith Butler. “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect”. In Frames of War. 33-62.

 

Week 3: Presentation on “Politics of the Damned”. Assigned Text: Phillip Mirowski. “One More Red Nightmare: The Crisis That Didn’t Change Much of Anything”. In Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso, 2013. 11-44.

 

Week 4: Presentation on “We the People”. Excerpts from Étienne Balibar. We, the People of Europe? Princeton UP, 2003. Press clippings.

 

Week 5: Presentation on “Collectivity”. Invisible Committee. Now. Semiotext(e), 2017.

 

Week 6: Presentation on “Cri-ti-que”. Assigned texts: Étienne Balibar. “Critique in the 21^st Century”. Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left 200 (2016).

 

Week 7: Presentation on “Is the Post- in Postcritical like the Neo- in Neoliberal?” Assigned Texts: Kwame Anthony Appiah. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17.2 (1991): 336-357. Rita Felski. “Introduction” and “The Stakes of Suspicion”. In The Limits of Critique U Chicago Press, 2015. 1-52.

 

Week 8: Presentation on “Postimperial Lisbon”. Assigned Texts: Bill Schwartz. “Postcolonial Times: The Visible and the Invisible” in Felix Driver and David Gilbert, eds. Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display, and Identity. Manchester University Press, 1999. 268-273. David Harvey. “London 2011: Feral Capitalism Hits the Streets”. In Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. Verso, 2012. 155- 158.

 

Week 9: Presentation on “New Fascisms”. Phillip K. Dick. The Man in the High Castle. Excerpts from press and other essays in “The New Fascism Syllabus” (http://www.thehistoryinquestion.com/syllabus/interrogating-the-past/the-syllabus/).

 

Week 10: Presentation on “We Are All Mad Here”. Assigned Texts: Excerpts from Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia. Verso, 2006. Thomas Docherty. “Force or the Body Politic and the ‘Sovereignty of Nature’”. In Universities at War. Sage Swifts, 2014. 1-45.

Selected Bibliography:

Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia. 2006.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Is the Post-in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17.2 (1991): 336-357.

Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. 1970.

Balibar, Étienne. We, the People of Europe? 2003.

Balibar, Étienne. Citizenship. 2015.

Balibar, Étienne. “Critique in the 21^stCentury”. Radical Philosophy: Philosophical Journal of the Independent Left 200. 2016.

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. 2017.

Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. 2015.

Butler, Judith. Frames of War. 2009.

Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx. 1994.

Dick, Phillip K. The Man in the High Castle. 1962.

Docherty, Thomas. Universities at War. 2014.

Driver, Felix and David Gilbert, eds. Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display, and Identity. 1999.

Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. 2015.

Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. 2012.

Invisible Committee. Now. 2017.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. 1981.

Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. 2002.

Jameson, Fredric. An American Utopia. 2016.

Mirowski, Phillip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. 2013.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. 2011.

Rancière, Jacques. The Intervals of Cinema. 2014.

Rancière, Jacques. The Edges of Fiction. 2019.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. 2017.

The New Fascism Syllabus (http://www.thehistoryinquestion.com/syllabus/interrogating-the-past/the-syllabus/).