Syllabus 2025-26
Each week there are multiple texts - however, the page count should usually add up to around 100 pages or less. These should all be easy to get; almost all are linked below or in the library, if not then easy to find through quick searches, but let me know if not.
You don't have to read every text every week, but read as much as possible, and try to get ahead rather than leaving it to the week before.
Try to read on paper where possible. Try to read the whole book where possible, but don't worry about missing some texts. Additional suggestions for reading are welcome.
We can talk about choices of texts, reasons for this (one reason will be that, if there seem to be gaps, these are more than accounted for by other modules). Any difficulties with getting texts, please let me know, this will help everyone.
Issues: m.gardiner@warwick.ac.uk
WEEK ONE: INTRODUCTION
No required reading, but try to get ahead with those below.
WEEK TWO: NOSTALGIA
Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life (2014), sections ‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’, ‘Nostalgia for Modernism’, ‘Always yearning for the time that just eluded us’, library paper or ebook
Katy Shaw, Hauntology (2018), 1-23, 105-110
Grafton Tanner, Foreverism (2024), 17-28, 63-76
WEEK THREE: TRANSPARENCY
Byung-Jul Han, Transparenzgesellschaft (2012)/ The Transparency Society (2015), 37-49 (also 9-14 and 21-28)
Thomas Docherty, Confessions: The Philosophy of Transparency (2012), 128-143, last part of Part Two: 'Of persuasion and the confessional ground of judgment' to end
Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs/ Black Skin, White Masks, (1967/ 1952), Ch.5, any edition, in library
WEEK FOUR: CLASS
WEEK FIVE: 'FEUDALISM'
Yevgeny Morozov, ‘Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason’ (2022)
Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism? (2024), 85-91, 97-108, 129-144, 176-179
Mckenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is this something worse? (2021), ch.2
Nick Land, 'Critique of Transcendental Miserablism' (2007), various sources
WEEK SIX: NUKES
Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (2012), 1-46, in library
John Kinsella and Drew Milne, ‘Nuclear Theory Degree Zero’, in eds. Kinsella and Milne, Nuclear Theory Degree Zero: Essays Against the Nuclear Android (2021), 1-16, version here
Adam Piette, ‘Deep Geological Disposal and Radioactive Time: Beckett, Bowen, Nirex and Onkalo’, in eds. Ryan and Bishop, Cold War Legacies (2016), in library
William Chaloupka, Knowing Nukes (1993), 43-67, 105-125, book in library
WEEK SEVEN: X-RISK
Federico Campagna, Prophetic Culture (2021), 23-47; cf. Technic and Magic (2018), 19-55
Thomas Moynihan, X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered its own Extinction (2020), 341-424
François J. Bonnett, Après la mort /After Death (2021/ 2017), 11-22
Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker, Sad Planets (2024), 88-115, 437-457
WEEK EIGHT: BULLSHIT
Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick (2020), 83-103, in library
WEEK NINE: SHANZHAI
Byung-Chul Han, Shanzhai: Dekonstruktion auf Chinesisch (2011)/ Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese (2017), 60-78
Mckenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street (2011), 30-37
Anna Greenspan, China and the Wireless Undertow (2023), 116-149
Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’: https://archive.org/details/DasKunstwerkImZeitalterSeinerTechnischenReproduzierbarkeit/page/n3/mode/2up / 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1935) (any edition)
WEEK TEN: PROVINCIALISATION
Yuk Hui, Post-Europe (2024), 67-102
Chūō Kōron First Symposium [The world-historical standpoint and Japan] (1943/ 1941), trans. in David Williams, The Philosophy of Japanese Wartime Resistance (2014) (both this week's books in library, paper, or ebook here)