(Update 16/09: Please note recent changes to the syllabus.)

Week 1: Theory

Max Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ [1937], in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. by Matthew J. O’Connell and others (New York: Continuum, 2002), pp. 188–252

Week 2: Neofeudalism

McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (London: Verso, 2019), pp. 39–59 (‘Capitalism—or Worse?’)

Jodi Dean, ‘Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?’, Los Angeles Review of Books (2020)

Yevgeny Morozov, ‘Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason’, New Left Review, 133/134 (2022), pp. 89–126

Week 4: Postmodernism

Fredric Jameson, ‘The Aesthetics of Singularity’, New Left Review, 92 (2015), 101–32

Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 1–53 (‘Introduction’)

Week 5: Nostalgia

Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life (Alresford: Zero, 2014), pp. 13–31, 107–10, 143–49 (‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future’, ‘Nostalgia for Modernism’, ‘Always yearning for the time that just eluded us’) [ebook in library]

Grafton Tanner, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia (London: Repeater, 2021), pp. 10–17 and 229–251 (‘The Decade That Time Stopped’, ‘The Politics of Nostalgia’, and ‘The Right to Nostalgia’)

Week 6: Dispossession

Brenna Bhandar, The Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), pp. 1–32 (‘Introduction’) [ebook in library]

Robert Nichols, Theft is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), pp. 52–84 (‘Chapter 2: Marx, after the Feast’) [ebook in library]

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach, 3 vols (London: Penguin, 1976–81), i, 873–95, 914–26 (‘Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation’, ‘Chapter 27: The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land’, ‘Chapter 31: The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist’)

Week 7: Infrastructure

Timothy Mitchell, ‘Infrastructures Work on Time’, e-flux (2020)

Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014), Introduction

Darin Barney, ‘Infrastructure and the Form of Politics’, Canadian Journal of Communication, 46.2 (2021), pp. 225–46

Week 8: Degrowth

Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vettea, and Aaron Vansintjan, The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism (London: Verso, 2022), pp. 36–74 (‘Economic Growth’)

Matt Huber, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (London: Verso, 2022) ('Chapter 4: Carbon Guilt: Privatized Ecologies, Degrowth, and the Politics of Less')

Week 9: Bullshit

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), pp. 27–65 (‘What Sorts of Bullshit Jobs Are There?’)

Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgement and Capitalist Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), pp. 83–103 (‘Transparency and Magic in the Gimmick as Technique’) [ebook in library]

Week 10: Exterminism

Jacques Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)’, trans. by Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, Diacritics, 14.2 (1984), pp. 20–31

Liam Sprod, Nuclear Futurism: The Work of Art in the Age of Remainderless Destruction (Alresford: Zero, 2012), pp. 6–35 (‘The (Non) Event of 1984’, ‘The New Beauty of Speed’, ‘The Fabulously Textual Nuclear War’)

Jessica Hurley, Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020) pp. 1–14 (‘Introduction’) [ebook in library]