Reading List

Meeting 1. The First Questions
Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault televised debates on “human nature”
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kawGakdNoT0&feature=related
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43Ai5WPHqWA&feature=related

Hannah Arendt, Selections from The Life of the Mind
“Body and soul; soul and mind” (pp 30-37)
“The two-in-one” (pp 179-196)
Volume II, Section IV (pp 149-218)

Recommended Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” and “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”

Meeting 2. When We Write the Questions Down
Edward Said, Selections from The World, The Text and The Critic
Introduction: Secular Criticism
Chapter 1: The World, the Text and the Critic
Chapter 8: Reflections on American “Left” Literary Criticism

Jean-Paul Sartre, “Why write?” from What Is Literature (pp 1336-1349 in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism)

Meeting 3. Throw Sartre over Your Shoulder for Good Luck
Merleau-Ponty, Selections from Adventures of the Dialectic
“The Crisis of Understanding”
“Sartre and Ultrabolshevism”

Frederic Jameson, Chapter 5, “Towards a Dialectical Criticism,” from Marxism and Form

For Further Thought “Western Marxism” from Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic; “Versions of a Marxist Hermeneutic” and “The Case for Georg Lukacs” from Jameson, Marxism and Form

Meeting 4. Do You Believe in Ghosts?
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

Meeting 5. Addressing War and Revolution
Selections from Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islam
Michel Foucault, “Is it useless to revolt”
Maxine Robinson response

Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place

Edward Said, “Islam and the West are Inadequate Barriers,” The Guardian, September 16, 2001
Recommended “American Intellectuals and Middle East Politics: An Interview with Edward W Said,” Social Text, No. 19/20 (Autumn, 1988) pp 37-53 and Michel Foucault, Society must be defended: Lectures 1975-6

Meeting 6. Absence and Image
Slavoj Zizek, “Introduction,” Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology

Slavoj Zizek, “Melancholy and the Act,” Critical Inquiry, Volume 26, November 4, Summer 2000.

Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholia,” Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Ed. D. Eng and D. Kazanjian)

Recommended Roland Barthes, Pleasure of the Text

Meeting 7. Technology and New Media
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
TBD

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Selections from Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media
TBD

Meeting 8. “I’m so excited…and I just can’t hide it”
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech

Meeting 9. Philosophy and Education
Jacques Ranciere, Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation

James Baldwin, Fire Next Time

Meeting 10. Philosophy and Education (II)
Jurgen Habermas, Second half of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Richard Rorty, Selections from Consequences of Pragmatism and Philosophy and Social Hope TBD