Investigates the politics of identity and recognition as the basis for claims about institutional legitimacy and social struggle. Examines such diverse figures as Sartre, Fanon, Bataille, Foucault, Lacan, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Zizek, and Badiou.
Focuses on moral, metaphysical, and epistemological issues using classical texts along with some contemporary readings on related philosophical problems. Plato, Kant, and Sartre provide the central readings on ethics, while Descartes, Hume, Kant (again), and Wittgenstein provide the central metaphysical and epistemological discussions. Issues of philosophy of language and method are highlighted throughout.
Studies the modern concept of revolution. Course proposes to inquire into the concept of revolution, insurgency, revolt and resistance in theory and practice. The course aims to analyze thinkers such Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, G.W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and the revolutionary declarations from the French Revolution to the Zapatista insurgency.
Explores the politics of resistance and how different thinkers have conceptualized what it means to resist, why it is necessary, and with what methods it should be done. Side by side with the theorists of resistance, the course analyzes examples of resistance from around the world, traversing different time periods, geographies, and cultures. Examples range from peasant revolts to labor movements, feminist struggles to anti-war mobilizations, prisoner uprisings to anti-colonial wars and contemporary forms of corporeal, self-sacrificial resistance. Relying upon the concrete political problems posed by each historical instance as springboards into larger theoretical concerns, the course focuses on questions such as the nature of power relations, different forms of political organization and representation, the relationship between means and ends, the role of violence, and the function of different media, especially as they become manifest in the complexity of real politics.
In the core of a London slum, with wars raging all around him, the printer William Blake sounded the trumpet of prophecy. This course channels Blake's war-time revelations, laying bare the antimonies of imperial violence and the prophetic tradition.
Students develop the skills necessary to analyze popular music. First, challenging common-sense understandings of how music functions. And second, understanding how history works its way into musical forms.
Examines the history and theory of the Black Panther Party (BPP). Texts situate the historical conditions leading to the BPP's rise; theoretical inspirations and contributions; national and international reach; and decline following state repression, electoral campaigns, and guerrilla warfare.
Examines how war is represented in journalism using perspectives from political theory, intellectual history, and related fields. Materials aim to challenge media depictions, from the Civil War to the War on Terror, assessing how news shapes knowledge of conflict.
Considers both the religious sources of political ideas and the political sources of religious ideas, addressing topics, such as sovereignty, justice, love, reason, revelation, sacrifice, victimhood, evil, racism, rebellion, reconciliation, and human rights.
Introduction to the relationship between philosophy and poetics in some major 19th- and 20th-century poets and thinkers.
Provides an introduction to critical scholarship on media infrastructures with a focus on cybernetic systems, internet protocol, surveillance, logistics, and finance. It explores how these configurations of power are reorganizing our societies and restructuring our subjectivities.
Analyzes films and images to consider how the genre of horror has screened the problems, expectations, and fantasized afterlives of racism, labor exploitation, ruin, and war.
Takes up the literary form of the parable to illuminate a pressing and complex problem: the threat of global climate change. How can the simplest of stories help us to explore our options for a planetary future?
Explores the meanings of modernity, religion, and violence and examines the conceptual status that war and sovereignty, long associated with religious belief, have since been accorded within the modern humanist and secular tradition. Also explores aspects of this tradition and their relationship to questions of morality and violence and how violence-and its relationship to secularism-can be better understood today as a mode of negotiating human existence in a world dominated by technology and its myths.
This interdisciplinary course considers the atom in four respects: as philosophical idea, as weapon, as catastrophe, and as clock. Students will learn about ancient atomisms, radiometric dating, the Manhattan Project, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
Survey of seminal work on ancient origins of the state, diverse geo-political systems of war and diplomacy, and consequences of the formation of the world market on the evolution of geo-political systems up to and beyond the wars of today.
Concentrates on the Marxist tradition of critical theory, centering on classical texts by Marx and by writers in the Marxist tradition up to the present.
Surveys major developments in the capitalist world economy from the 13th century to today. Topics include: the transition to capitalism in Europe; the emergence of banking; colonization, slavery, and uneven development; industrialization; and globalization.
Provides the historical context and the theoretical tools necessary for understanding today's radical right. Specific focus on considering the far right in the context of radical constructions under conditions of late capitalism.
Examines the material, discursive, and racialized conditions that have produced refugees in the last century. Also examines the social claims made by refugees, institutional responses to them, and political alternatives to state belonging
Course touches on the philosophical roots of Hegel's text, starting from the pre-World War II rereading of Hegel's master/slave dialectic that became the kernel of postwar thought arising from struggles over capitalism, communism, fascism, racism, colonialism, and feminism.
Examines the modern concept of state, its anthropological assumptions, categories, its critique, and its crisis. Inquires into the concept of representation, borders, security and control in thinkers, such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt, and Lenin.
Gives students a grasp of different definitions and uses of the concept queerness in its relationship to race and how it's tied to the politics of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) identity.
Inquires into the relationship between politics and violence as articulated by early modern, modern, and contemporary political theorists. Investigates the role of violence in the constitution and maintenance of sovereign power and the construction of the modern subject of politics.
How postcolonial thought occasions the reconsideration of the Western tradition of political philosophy and the discovery of alternative pathways of modernization within it.
Introduces the histories of exploration, museum collection, and photography that shape historical and contemporary ideas about race, culture, and place in Africa.
Provides an introduction to classical and contemporary texts of radical political theory, a body of work that critically examines fundamental premises of politics. Addresses the question What is the 'political?'
Provides students an opportunity for in-depth analysis of advanced topics within the history of consciousness arena. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic.
The development of Freud's concept of mind. Extensive reading tracing the origins and development of Freud's theories and concepts (e.g., abreaction, psychic energy, defense, wish-fulfillment, unconscious fantasy, dreams, symptoms, transference, cure, sexuality) and emphasizing the underlying model of the mind and mental functioning.
Introduces the comparative study of world religions and provides critical entry points toward the understanding of its history as a discipline. Special emphasis on the troubled history of imperialism, orientalism, and facile generalizations that have always accompanied the attempt to understand foreign or dead cultures.
Critically engages with feminist-Marxist perspectives on social-reproduction. Introduces the foundation of Marxism and feminist-Marxist critique while examining the international feminist struggle historically from the origins of capitalism to the present moment.
Examines the socio-political and cultural origins of early 20th-century avant-garde movements focusing on the vanguard movement of futurism, the roles played by the disenchantment of the world, and technological rationalization as it relates to warfare and aesthetic production.
A program of individual study arranged between an undergraduate student and a faculty member. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
An introduction to history of consciousness required of all incoming students. The seminar concentrates on theory, methods, and research techniques. Major interpretive approaches drawn from cultural and political analysis are discussed in their application to specific problems in the history of consciousness. Prerequisite(s): first-year standing in the program. See the department office for more information. (Formerly course 203.)
Writing-intensive course based on readings in course 203A.
Examines major streams of theorization about the subject in postwar and contemporary continental and critical theory. Thinkers include Althusser, Badiou, Balibar, Butler, Fanon, Foucault, Honneth, Laclau and Mouffe, Mbembe, Ranciere, and Sartre.
There is a history of political consciousness that culminated in the project of enlightenment. There is a history of individual, collective, and political unconscious, which culminated in fascism. These two histories are intertwined, but their outcome is not preconceived. On the contrary, their relationship and integration constitute a field of possibilities for social, political, and human experimentation. This course inquires into the concept of political unconscious by exploring thinkers, such as Kant, Foucault, Adorno, Horkheimer, Freud, Jung, Reich, Fromm, Marcuse, and Klein.
Explores foundational and emergent theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of race. Issues examined include the production of race within and across various spheres of human activity and how race has shaped notions of difference and commonality in the past and present.
Addresses about 10 of the significant critiques of human rights discourse published in the past decade by authors, such as Moyn, Douzinas, Fassin, Ticktin, J. Slaughter, D. Chandler, Mamdani, Weitzman, Badiou, and Meister.
Students expected to locate with fluency and precision their own research projects within the conceptual and methodological frameworks defining the late-20th century constellation of thought to be laid out systematically over the course of the term.
Writing intensive course based on readings in course 222A. (Formerly Theories of Late Capitalism, Nationalism, and the Politics of Identity.)
Through close readings of Althusser's major texts, this course systematically examines the political and philosophical thought of Louis Althusser and analyzes why he is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century.
Investigates the many layers of Marx's Capital.
Examines modern conceptions of liberty from a non-liberal perspective. Proposes to inquire into the concept of liberty as an individual and collective right by exploring its philosophical justifications and criticism in thinkers, such as Kant, Hegel, and Marx.
Provides a careful contextualization and a critically informed interrogation of the major works of Carl Schmitt, a figure at the center of many contemporary debates in political and legal thought.
Introduces the relation between philosophy and poetics in some major 20th-century poets and thinkers.
Writing-intensive course based on readings in course 230A.
Explores the rise and fall of the philosophical system. It proposes to inquire into the origin of the systematic philosophy, its development, its crisis, and its disintegration. This theoretical trajectory will be investigated together with alternative trajectories in thinkers, such as I. Kant, G. Fichte, Novalis, K.W.F. Schlegel, G.W.F. Hegel, M. Stirner, S. Kierkegaard, K. Marx, F. Nietzsche, L. Wittgenstein, T.W. Adorno, W. Benjamin, Empedocles.
Examines the various modes through which intellectuals, artists, and other commentators have written about music as a socially situated art as well as the ways they have theorized the social through examinations of musical phenomena. Focus changes with course offering.
Focuses on the critical-theoretical approaches that are associated with an interdisciplinary group of scholars affiliated with the Institute for Social Research, known as the "Frankfurt School". Surveys some of their most important contributions to the critique of capitalism, the authoritarian state, instrumental reason, culture, historical progress, law, and social organization. Discusses whether or not these different works fit together into a single tradition called "critical theory" and what theoretical and political implications the gesture of such naming entails. Investigates the normative foundations of critique and the philosophical influences that shape them. Course also explores the different "generations" of the Frankfurt School and map out the relationship of these thinkers to the traditions of Western Marxism, psychoanalysis, and social theory. Concludes by analyzing the limitations of critical theory and the intellectual challenges it faces in the contemporary world.
Students read landmark works of classical and contemporary Marxism. Writings from Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, Benjamin, Sartre, Althusser, Anderson, Jameson, and Zizek are addressed.
Writing-intensive seminar based on course 237A. Students read landmark works of classical and contemporary Marxism. Writings from Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, Benjamin, Sartre, Althusser, Anderson, Jameson, and Zizek are discussed.
Provides training for graduate students in university-level pedagogy in general. Under the supervision of the department chair, coordinated by a graduate student with substantial experience as a teaching assistant.
Study of the work and influence of Frantz Fanon from a range of viewpoints: existential, phenomenological, psychoanalytic, and political; a variety of genres: film, literature, case history, and critique; and a set of institutional histories: clinical, cultural, and intellectual.
Writing intensive course based on readings in course 242A.
Examines the history of black radical intellectual, cultural, political, and/or social movements. May take the form of a survey of different aspects of black radicalism or may focus on a particular individual, groups, period, etc.
Offers a critical introduction and overview of black critical theory across multiple fields and genres. Beginning with the question of race and ontology, students go on to consider questions of sovereignty and domination, freedom and liberation, identity and difference, and conclude with a study of race and the post-human. Major thinkers studied include: Sylvia Wynter, Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, and W.E.B. DuBois, as well as contemporary figures, such as Frank Wilderson, Fred Moten, and Hortense Spillers.
French poststructuralism, with particular attention to the main philosophical texts of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Other representative theorists as well as critics of poststructuralism are studied as time permits.
Survey of 19th- and 20th-century intellectual history that focuses on a cross-section of major works from Hegel to Levi-Strauss.
Examines key works of Frankfurt School theorist Jurgen Habermas, his followers, and critics, on topics such as the public sphere, the theory of communicative action, power and domination, and religion and secularism.
Survey of European philosophies of difference, tracing the evolution of philosophical concepts and frameworks from Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Bergson, and Heidegger through later 20th-century French post-structuralist, feminist, and Frankfurt School theory.
Examines the position of Africa in cultural studies and the simultaneous processes of over- and under-representation of the continent that mark enunciations of the global and the local. Themes include defining diaspora, the West as philosophy, and Africa in the global economy.
Focuses on the theorization of life and death in relation to power as proposed by 20th-century thinkers. Investigates how a biopolitical problematic has emerged and what insights into politics it offers. Explores the different ways in which thinkers have conceptualized biopolitics and its broader implications.
Focuses on the exploration of biopolitics and necropolitics on the body. Examines how the body has become deeply integrated into power relations in modern society. Also explores different forms of corporeality that are conduits of political struggle and sites of transgression, resistance, and refusal.
Readings include works by speakers at UCSC's Rethinking Capitalism Initiative. Topics are: (1) financialization versus commodification (how options-theory has changed capitalism); (2) material markets (how this theory performs); and (3) valuation and contingency (how economies make worlds).
Course 268A addressed changes in the theory and practice of capitalism as derivatives markets have become increasingly central to it. This course, which can be regarded as either background or sequel, concerns questions that surround recent debates about derivatives from the standpoint of broader developments in law, culture, politics, ethics, ontology, and theology. What would it mean to see questions of contingency and value as a challenge to late-modern understandings of these modes of thought?
Covers modern conceptions of property and their critique. Inquires into the concept of property as an individual right by exploring its philosophical justifications and criticism in thinkers, such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, G.W. F. Hegel, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Karl Marx.
Explores the critique of the unilinear historical time through the prism of Reinhart Koselleck, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch's attempts to reconfigure the concepts of time and history. During the course, students investigate how time affects both representation of reality and political praxis.
Course aims to rethink Marx against the grain, from the debate with Russian populists to Capital and the Grundrisse. Investigates formal subsumption not as a historical stage, but as a form that denotes how capitalism encounters, incorporates, and combines existing modes of production without creating a homogeneous world.
The guiding thought of this seminar is the question of what is, and is not, sovereign. Exploring a wide range of authors (such as Bodin, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Schmitt, Bataille, and Fanon), this seminar addresses the most salient problems in recent discussions of sovereignty.
Readings focus on the early 20th-century rediscovery of political theology; its use in theorizations of the Holocaust; and its return in 21st-centurty debates on empires, war, terror, enmity, reconciliation, fanaticism, human rights, political economy, and global catastrophe. Students cannot receive credit for this course and course 85.
Independent study formalizing the advisee-adviser relationship. Regular meetings to plan, assess and monitor academic progress, and to evaluate coursework as necessary. May be used to develop general bibliography of background reading and trajectory of study in preparation for the qualifying examination.
A practicum in the genres of scholarly writing, for graduate students working on the composition of their qualifying essay or doctoral dissertation.
Research carried out in field settings, based on a project approved by the responsible faculty. The student must file a prospectus with the department office before undertaking the research and a final report of activities upon return.
Research carried out in field settings, based on a project approved by the responsible faculty. The student must file a prospectus with the department office before undertaking the research and a final report of activities upon return.
Research carried out in field settings, based on a project approved by the responsible faculty. The student must file a prospectus with the department office before undertaking the research and a final report of activities upon return.
Directed graduate research and writing coordinated with the teaching of undergraduates. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Directed graduate research and writing coordinated with the teaching of undergraduates. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Directed graduate research and writing coordinated with the teaching of undergraduates. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Systematic working through a prearranged bibliography which is filed as a final report at the end of the quarter with the signature of the instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Systematic working through a prearranged bibliography which is filed as a final report at the end of the quarter with the signature of the instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Systematic working through a prearranged bibliography which is filed as a final report at the end of the quarter with the signature of the instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Systematic working through a prearranged bibliography which is filed as a final report at the end of the quarter with the signature of the instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
A seminar study group for graduate students focusing each quarter on various problems in the history of consciousness. A statement and evaluation of the work done in the course will be provided each quarter by the students who have participated in the course for that quarter, and reviewed by the responsible faculty.
Independent study and research under faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Independent study and research under faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Independent study and research under faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Under the supervision of a History of Consciousness faculty member, students finishing their dissertation meet weekly or bi-weekly to read and discuss selected draft chapters, design difficulties and composition problems.
Prerequisite(s): advancement to candidacy.
Prerequisite(s): advancement to candidacy.
Prerequisite(s): advancement to candidacy.