“Politics of the Debt” is a discussion of an essay by Professor Balibar on the new configurations of the “debt economy.” The focus on debt and financialization opens our discussion to larger questions of subjectivity, subjection, and citizenship under neoliberal capitalism. “Politics of the Debt” is available in advance by emailing critical_theory@berkeley.edu. Response by Wendy Brown, Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley.

Étienne Balibar was born in 1942. He graduated from the École Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne in Paris, and later took his PhD from the University of Nijmegen.

For his lecture “Foucault and Marx: A Disjunctive Synthesis?”, Étienne Balibar discusses connections and disjunctions between Michel Foucault and Karl Marx, using Foucault’s 1972 Collège de France lectures on La société punitive as an alternative lens for the question of “reproduction” and its relationship to class struggles. With Foucault and Marx as a starting point for a new confrontation, he also reconsiders the idea of “communism” today. Response by Judith Butler, Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley.

Étienne Balibar was born in 1942. He graduated from the École Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne in Paris, and later took his PhD from the University of Nijmegen.

Acts of faith challenge boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between rationality and intuition. Bringing together diverse topics such as social and aesthetic suspension of disbelief, post-secularism, and the miraculous, the concept of faith functions as a springboard for interdisciplinary discussions, engaging fields from literary studies to political theory. Against this background, the papers at this conference explore diverse acts of faith and their significance in both secular and religious contexts.

Policing of illegal markets has contributed significantly to the strengthening of international law as an institutional presence. Such policing efforts both mediate and contribute to anxieties related to globalization. They also generate other significant effects in international space–including the formation of a global demos that may lay the groundwork for greater levels of global regulation in the future. The implications of this dynamic are strikingly at odds with traditional liberal theories of governance and of internationalization, suggesting that the foundation for governance is not contractarian but security-based.

In this meeting we discuss the potential uses and limitations of Marxist approaches to the contemporary theorization and study of neoliberal capitalism. While some have described neoliberalism as a modification in the mode of production, entailing new ideological categories and a retrenchment of class power, others have emphasized its non-unified character and its unique forms of governmentality, which have reconfigured relations between the state, economy, and citizen-subjects. This session hopes to engage and think with Marxist traditions by asking which central insights remain essential to account for neoliberal capitalism–from surplus value and capital accumulation to commodification and fetishism–and whether new analytical tools are required to grasp changes in contemporary capitalist power relations.

Critical Theory presents a special seminar and discussion with Howard Eiland, Michael Jennings, and Lindsay Waters, authors and editors of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Harvard University Press, 2014).

Howard Eiland has been collaborating with Michael W. Jennings since the early 1990s on translating and editing the works of Walter Benjamin, including The Arcades Project, Berlin Childhood around 1900, On Hashish, Early Writings 1910-1917, and four published volumes to date of Benjamin’s Selected Writings.

The first full critical biography of Benjamin in any language, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Harvard 2014) is the capstone of a twenty-year collaboration between scholars Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings on Walter Benjamin’s life, work, and critical legacy. The Program in Critical Theory brings them together with Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters for a discussion of the book’s implications for Benjamin scholarship. Critical Theory co-director Martin Jay moderates a conversation on the genesis of the project and the possibility of writing a “Benjaminian” biography.

Professor Melas, past Chair of Cornell University’s Comparative Literature Department, and Co-founder of its Institute for Comparative Modernities and its interdisciplinary “Critical Theory and (post)Colonialism Workshop,” is author of All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (Stanford UP, 2007), which was runner-up for the American Comparative Literature Association’s Wellek Prize for Book of the Year.

In his analysis of two contemporary forms of violence – the death-penalty and the violent exploitation of animals – Jacques Derrida showed how deeply rooted their conceptual bases are within contemporary institutions and practices. Moreover, his analyses showed the extent to which many of the discourses which claim to oppose them are caught up in the very conceptual space which sustains the forms of violence they purport to contest. In this talk, I focus on one of the resources Derrida’s own work offers for grappling with this difficulty.

In this session, we reflect on how norms and practices of neoliberal governmentality are disseminated and transformed across borders. Professors Elyachar, Rofel and Bargu’s extensive studies of Egypt, China, and Turkey respectively, offer new insights into how different forms of neoliberalism transform social and political life in various contexts, while also calling into question the enduring viability of neoliberalism as an analytic frame. We aim collectively to problematize and contest Eurocentric approaches to the study of neoliberalism, while also investigating the role under neoliberalism of NGOs, IGOs, corporations and state institutions.

This talk will attempt a hyper-extended reading of Pasolini’s Petrolio as a work–alchemical, novelistic, organicist–that explores the profound ties between fossil fuels and narrative. Written, obviously, before a widespread consciousness of climate change, Petrolio seems impressively to anticipate, and somehow to correspond intriguingly with, the chaotic temporality of the Anthropocene. (Pinkus)

Karen Pinkus is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University.

The opening session of the Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Working Group provides a space for discussion of the lasting insights, limitations, and potential applications of Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. Linking neoliberalism and biopolitics at both the historical and conceptual level, Foucault’s prescient lecture series lays the groundwork for the working group’s concern with the contemporary management of populations through diverse practices of economization, privatization, and financialization.

To close our year-long colloquium series we welcome Immanuel Wallerstein. For 30 years he was Director of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations at the State University of New York, Binghamton. He is now Senior Research Scholar at Yale University.

Among living sociologists no one has exercised more influence on the social sciences than Immanuel Wallerstein. His contributions to social science go well beyond producing a 50-year series of exceptional award-winning books and articles too numerous to count.

Anne-Lise François joined the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1999, after receiving her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. François works in the modern period, comparative romanticisms; lyric poetry; the psychological novel and novel of manners; gender and critical theory; literature and philosophy; and ecocriticism. Her current teaching focuses on the convergence of literary and environmental studies.

Practically every major Western theorist of note has a passage or two about “Peter” and “Paul.” Both Henri Bergson and Karl Marx enlist the services of Peter and Paul to exemplify the irreducibility of the virtual, non-liveable dimension of the “All.” Specifically, for Bergson, it is to demonstrate the shared “single time” of simultaneity. For Marx, it is to show the multiplicity of contemporary times shared by “humanity” – read antagonism or historicity. This talk introduces the so-called “multirealist” or “multinaturalist” turn in the contemporary anthropology by way of Bergson’s and Marx’s Peter and Paul.

Adorno has a complex attitude toward utopian thought. On the one hand, he views as dangerous and destructive fascist and ‘vulgar’ Marxist strands of utopianism and has a subtle diagnostic critique of their attractions and deficiencies. On the other hand, he views the proper use of utopian imagination to be essential for human freedom and writes copiously about the dangers of prior ideological constraint not only of the content of imagination but also of the possible forms that imagination can take, political and otherwise. This paper joins an analysis of Adorno’s thought on utopianism with an exposition and critique of his interpretation of Mahler’s symphonic practice.

University of Chicago Historian, Prof. Dipesh Chakrabarty talks on certain rifts in the literature on climate change to demonstrate the role that the problem of scale plays in making the phenomenon of global warming into a human predicament.

Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

The Graduate Students Association of the Department of Rhetoric invites you to “Theory/Post-Theory.” This one-day conference aims to consider the role, value, and efficacy of theory in the humanities and social sciences. Featuring panels on post-colonial discourses, visual culture, rhetorical traditions, and queer theory, we will investigate the contested status of theoretical thought in the academy. The keynote address will be delivered by Professor David N. Rodowick (Chicago) on his most recent book, Elegy for Theory (Harvard University Press 2014). Reception to follow.

Presented by the Department of Italian Studies with the Program in Critical Theory.

New York City has nearly six hundred miles of coastline. We turn our backs on the waters that surround us to our great peril. For many years, experts of various stripes have been warning about the threat posed to the city by climate change-induced rising tides. In 1999, for example, the Environmental Defense Fund published a report titled “Hot Nights in the City: Global Warming, Sea-Level Rise, and the New York Metropolitan Region.” A decade later, MoMA and P.S.1 collaborated on a design competition, “Rising Tides: Projects for New York’s Waterfront,” that was intended to explore innovative solutions to the city’s heightened vulnerability to storm-surge induced inundation.

This lecture explores care and the ordinary, following a thread of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that takes us beyond the “grammar” of the first person, the use of psychological verbs and the nature of states of mind. Wittgenstein invented a philosophy of subjectivity, not as an entity or object, but as voice; that is, as expressed in language and as the site of production of ordinary moral expression. Cavell’s radical reading of Austin, Wittgenstein and the relationship between skepticism, acknowledgement and tragedy has produced the clearest statement of an ordinary language philosophy open to vulnerability. From this comes the idea of an ethics formulated in another voice.

In following the moderns in the making of scientific knowledge, STS scholars have shown an interesting discrepancy between what scientists do in practice and what they say they do in theory. Indeed, scientific objectivity has been entirely reconfigured and reinterpreted in very different ways. In continuity with this endeavor, and because the definition of the object goes hand in hand with the definition of the subject, one of my obsessions has been to re-interrogate the definition of the knowing subject.

In a departure from their earlier positions, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer treat antisemitism as a fundamental element of a significant historical turn in the late 19th and 20th centuries, one that, for many, entailed an apparent reversal of the Enlightenment. They, however, root this turn in a dialectic of Enlightenment (and civilization) itself. In so doing, Adorno and Horkheimer — like Arendt — treat the problematic of antisemitism as central to a crisis of modernity. Yet, as others have also noted, their dense and complex analysis of antisemitism is problematic.

Recent occurrences of natural disasters from earthquakes, typhoons, and tsunamis in the global south starkly make visible the uneven distribution of human precarity on a planetary scale. As the transnational transit of goods, information, and people continues to reshape our notions of global humanity and community, climate change imposes limits upon their very possibility. In what ways, then, might we think climate change with reference to political notions of precarity, and how might we frame it within broader histories of coloniality?

Samia Rahimtoola moderates a discussion on the affective, cultural, and political structures of toxic experience. Topics under discussion include: How might we rethink the politics and polemics of environmentalism from an already toxic moment? How might toxicity enable a reorientation of the subject? And, how does toxicity disrupt prevailing distinctions between lively and non-lively matter?

Readings: Ulrich Beck, Risk Society, Preface & Chapter 1

The Program in Critical Theory presents a seminar with Professor Christoph Menke on the first half of his work Law and Violence, titled “The Fate of the Law.” Participants may also wish to read Part I of Professor Menke’s book Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett to prepare for the seminar.

Christoph Menke is Professor of Practical Philosophy at Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main.

In his essay on the “Critique of Law”, Walter Benjamin analyzes the paradoxical entwinement that ties law to violence. This paradoxical structure forms the mythical fate of law. The talk starts with a reconstruction of this diagnosis in terms of the structure of legal subjectivity. It will then explore the question if, and how, a break with fate – or a way out of the paradox of law without reducing its necessity – is possible. The question will be how to understand the idea of an “Entsetzung” (relief?) of law.

Join Critical Theory faculty and students for an informal information session about the Designated Emphasis (DE) in Critical Theory. Open to UC Berkeley graduate students pursuing a Ph.D. who are considering enrolling in the Critical Theory DE.

Applications for the DE in Critical Theory are due Thursday, March 20 at 4pm. Contact critical_theory@berkeley.edu for more information.

The first gathering will be devoted to asking how the study of ecology might be politicized. We will consider how central concepts of classical social theory–including labor as mediated nature, the commons, and living capital–might be seen differently in light recent research on infrastructure and animal studies.

In preparation for our discussion, please read the following:

Nicole Shukin, Introduction to Animal Capital, 6-24.

Lament is at first glance a performative speech act like any other: it enacts the grief it speaks of and thus ineluctably does what it says. But its performativity is peculiar. Rather than demonstrating the potency of language — its ability to produce the state of affairs it designates (I baptize you, I order you, I marry you, etc.) – the lament points rather to an impotence or undoing that erodes the sinews of both speech and action. While the possibility of malfunction is built into every speech act as the structural condition of its own success (strictly speaking, my promise counts as one only if it can be broken; my command has authority only if it can be disregarded)