The Theory Reading Group is a cross-disciplinary forum bringing together graduate students and postdoctoral researchers from across the Humanities for collaborative reflection on the issues of planetary importance. This semester's meetings will be devoted to discussions of contemporary theoretical texts grouped under the theme of "Global Decoloniality." The intellectual problems we will engage with include the coloniality of modernity, cultures of scholarship, subaltern thought, epistemic delinking, and decolonial politics, ethics, and aesthetics in various geographies from Latin American to African, South Asian. and post-Soviet formations.
2017-2018
- Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance
- Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
- Paul Mason,Excommunication" + "The Unconscious and Repetition"
- Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
Past Readings:
2016-2017
- Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left
- Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory
- Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly
- Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance
- Giovanna Borradori (ed.), Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida
- Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory
- Razmig Keucheyan, The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today
- Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious Marx and Lacan
2015-2016
- Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
- Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
- Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time (excerpts)
- Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (excerpts)
2013 - 2014
- Peggy Kamuf, To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida
- Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism
- Jacques Lezra, Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic
- Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism
- Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism
- Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or, the Prosthesis of Origin
- Étienne Balibar, "Sub specie universitatis," "On Universalism," "Ambiguous Universality"
2012-2013
- Richard Calichman, Contemporary Japanese Thought
- Lisa Lowe, "Work, Immigration, Gender: New Subjects of Cultural Politics"
- Anthony Bogues, "And What about the Human?: Freedom, Human Emancipation, and the Radical Imagination"
- Walter Mignolo, "The Zapatistas's Theoretical Revolution: Its Historical, Ethical, and Political Consequences"
- Rodolfo Kusch, Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América
- John Holloway, Crack Capitalism
- Alain Badiou, Philosophy for Militants
- Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud
2011 - 2012
- Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea
- Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
- Marina Sitrin, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina
- Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, Autonomia: Post-political Politics