We are delighted to announce that Gregynog Ideas Lab III will take place from 7-12 July 2014. Further details will be posted as they become available, but see the panel on the right for a more detailed announcement and a provisional schedule. Bookings will open shortly.
A unique opportunity for graduate students and academics working in international politics from a range of critical, postcolonial, feminist, post-structural and psychoanalytic traditions to re-examine their own work and meet new people. An open space for thinking and generating new ideas.
Gregynog Hall
23 July 2013
08 July 2013
Schedule
GREGYNOG
IDEAS LAB SUMMER SCHOOL 2013: SCHEDULE
Monday 15 July
|
Tuesday 16 July
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Wednesday 17 July
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Thursday 18 July
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Friday 19 July
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Saturday 20 July
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8.00-9.00
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breakfast
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breakfast
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breakfast
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breakfast
|
breakfast
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9.30-11.00
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Writing Workshops
1:
Music Room |
Writing
Workshops 2 :
Music Room |
Writing Workshop
3:
Music Room |
Writing Workshops
4:
Music Room |
Wash-up session: Music room
|
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11-11.30
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coffee
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coffee
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coffee
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coffee
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coffee
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11.30-1.00
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Seminar Stream B Session 1: Joicey; Weaver; Library
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Seminar Stream A Session 2:
Joicey; Weaver; Library |
Seminar Stream D Session 2: Joicey; Weaver; Library
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Surgeries 3: Music room
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Closing Plenary:
Music room: Mick Dillon
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1.00-2:00
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lunch
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lunch
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lunch
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lunch
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lunch
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2.00 - 3.30
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Arrival
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No classes
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Seminar Stream B Session 2: Joicey; Weaver; Library
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Publishing
Workshop
Music Room |
Seminar Stream B Session 3: Joicey; Weaver; Library
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Departure
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3.30-4.00
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tea and cakes
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tea and cakes
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tea and cakes
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tea and cakes
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tea and cakes
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4.00 - 5.30
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Opening Plenary Music room:
Himadeep Muppidi |
Seminar Stream C Session 1: Music room
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No classes
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Surgeries 2: Music room
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Seminar Stream C Session 3: Music room
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5.45 - 7.15
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Stream A Seminar Session 1:
Joicey; Weaver; Library |
Seminar Stream D Session 1: Joicey; Weaver; Library
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Seminar Stream C Session 2: Music room
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Seminar Stream A Session 3: Joicey; Weaver; Library
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Seminar Stream D Session 3: Joicey; Weaver; Library
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7.30-9.00
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dinner
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dinner
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dinner
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dinner
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barbeque
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9.00-10.30
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Participants Research Presentations I: Music room
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Participants Research Presentations II: Music room
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Surgeries 1:
Music room
|
No
classes
|
No classes
|
Seminars
with Guest Professors: These form the heart of the School and
comprise three sessions of 90 minutes. Further details and pre-reading
requirements are circulated separately. Participants can choose a maximum of
one seminar (which consists of three sessions) from each stream:
Stream A:
a. Obscene politics: eroticism, the body
and the visual as a method / Andreja Zevnik OR
b.
Unthinking IR: Culture, Capital and Modernity / Himadeep Muppidi OR
c. Biopolitics, thanatopolitics, zoopolitics / Nick Vaughan-Williams
Stream
B:
a.
Words and Pictures / Stories and Photographs / Jenny Edkins OR
b. Critique and the international / Rob
Walker OR
c. Sovereignty, time, subject (title
to be confirmed) / Richard K Ashley
Stream
C:
Michael J Shapiro:
1: War Crimes 2: Borderline Justice 3: Justice and the Archives
Stream
D:
a.
Other ‘Foucaults’ and the politics of (scholarly) practice / Erzsebet
Strausz OR
b.
Time and Politics: Encountering the ‘Event’ in Poststructural Thought / Tom
Lundborg OR
c. Politics of
Truth: Political
Spirituality, the Courage of Truth (Parrhesia), and Revolts of Conduct / Michael
Dillon
Writing Workshop:
led by Himadeep Muppidi and Erzsebet Strausz will
run each morning, exploring and practicing alternative ways of writing as well
as uncovering motivations for traditional writing formats.
Participants’
Research Presentations:
Two sessions will run, each consisting of 5 presentations of 10 minutes,
if there is demand: there is no
obligation to give a presentation, but if your funding requires you to do so,
or if you would like to present, let us know. Priority
will be given to those who need to do this to get funding.
Posters:
It is also possible to display a poster detailing your research: please let us
know if you would like to do this.
Surgeries: Three
sessions have been set aside for research surgeries. These are sessions where
participants can discuss their research with one of the Guest Professors. There
is no need to book in advance: during each session Guest Professors will be
available for informal discussions at a table in the music room.
Publishing
workshop:
Led by Nicola Parkin of Routledge will give a chance for participants to
discuss publishing strategies and the practicalities of getting published. During the School, Jenny Edkins and Nick
Vaughan-Williams, editors of the Routledge Interventions Series, will be on
hand for individual discussions.
Closing
Plenary:
We are delighted to announce that the closing plenary will be given by
Professor Michael Dillon, Emeritus Professor at Lancaster University.
Films
relevant to the seminars will be shown during the School; there will be walks
and other activities; particpants are encouraged to bring musical instruments;
Gregynog has several pianos.
July 8, 2013
Seminars
Gregynog Ideas Lab II
Seminars
Gregynog Ideas Lab, 15-20 July 2013
Gregynog Ideas Lab Summer School 2013
Politics of Truth: Political
Spirituality, the Courage of Truth (Parrhesia), and Revolts of Conduct
Michael
Dillon
‘There
is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than the
[indefinite] relationship one has with oneself.’
(Michel
Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: 252)
These three seminars afford me the
opportunity of pursuing themes raised in my forthcoming essay for Millennium that figures here, with
Chapter 9 from The Order of Things
and some background on key terms such as periodisation and ‘factical finitude’, as the prolegomena to
the course. The background is, however, less the death of God, which is the
title of the Millennium special issue
in which the essay will appear, than the death of Man and of Life. Along with
‘Life’, God and Man are understood to be what Foucault would have called strategic
figures that seek to provide a measure of strategic coherence to the many
changing veridical apparatuses and dispositifs of modern power relations. The
themes at issue concern political spirituality, the courage of truth and
revolts of conduct, as Michel Foucault developed these in his Cours
au Collège de France. Albeit
largely preoccupied with developments the Greco-Roman period, and progressively
also Christianity, those lectures are read as integral to Foucault’s pursuit of
the history of the present, to his preoccupation with power and ultimately also
to his exploration of the allied problematics of politics and freedom as an
ethics (askesis) of the self.
One of the single most important
insights to be gleaned from Foucault’s work is that, since all politics of
truth are idiomatic (historically conditioned) and since every rule of truth is
simultaneously also a truth of rule, the conditioning of any specific rule regime
of truth and rule may be transformed by the conditions to which it in turn
gives rise. To apply that insight today
is to recognise, for example, that whatever the conditioning to which the terms
modernity and modernization have given expression, the experience of modernization
has itself transformed the conditions of the present. It is our modern politics
of truth that therefore sets the condition that intrigues these seminars.
Specifically, the seminars will pose three questions:
1. I take it to be an
unassailable empirical fact, as well as an expression of the philosophical
aporia explored by Foucault in The Order
of Things that conditioned and continues to govern our modern politics of
truth, that neither the governors nor the governed know, or can know, what is
going on politically. How, then, can there be a ‘courage of truth’ when the
politics and theatrical economies of modern truth telling have rendered
political truth radically opaque to the modern political subject of truth –
governors and governed alike?
2. What did Foucault mean
by spirituality in general and by political spirituality in particular
especially when he used the latter expression to describe aspects of the
insurrection that precipitated the Iranian revolution in 1978?
3.
What does spirituality
have to do with the courage of truth, the parrhesia
whose career Foucault explored as it migrated through the Hellenistic into the
Roman and Christian worlds? Can there be a courage of truth under the
conditions obtaining in our modern politics of truth, and if so what would that
demand in terms of political spirituality and the askesis of a political self capable not simply of saying no to rule
but of governing itself differently?
Prolegomena
Michael
Dillon, ‘Afterlife: Living Death to Political Spirituality,’ in, Millennium: Journal of International Studies
Forthcoming Special Issue on The
Death of God and International Relations.
Michel
Foucault, The Order of Things, ‘Chapter
9, Man Doubles’.
Francois
Raffoul and Eric Sean Nelson, eds., Rethinking
Facticity, ‘Introduction’
Kathleen
Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty,
‘Introduction’
Seminar One: Political Spirituality and Revolts of
Conduct: Iran 1978 to Paris 1981-1982
Primary Readings
Foucault
Iran Reports in the Appendix to Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution.
Michel
Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Cours au Collège de France, 1981-1982 Introduction and Lectures 2, 4-7, 19 and 24.
Supplementary
Readings
Michel
de Certeau, The Mystic Fable. Volume One.
The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Chapter 3, ‘The New Science’.
Amy
Hollywood and Patricia Beckman, eds., The
Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Chapter 5
Apophatic and Cataphatic Theology’.
Seminar Two: Parrhesia: A Genealogy of the Courage of
Truth
Primary Readings
Michel
Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, Cours au Collège de France, 1981-1970-1971 Introduction, and ‘Lecture 13 Lecture on Nietzsche,’
Michel
Foucault, The Government of Self and Others,
Cours au Collège de France, 1982-1983 Introduction,
Lectures 3, 4 11, 16-19
Michel
Foucault, The Courage of Truth Cours
au Collège de France, 1983-1984 Introduction, Lectures 1-4, 9, 12, 18
Supplementary Readings
Edward
McGushin, Foucault’s Askesis, ‘Introduction’
and ‘Truth as a Problem’
David
Webb Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge,
‘Introduction’ and ‘Chapter One To What Problem Does the Archaeology of
Knowledge Respond?’, ‘’Conclusion’ and ‘Closing Remarks’.
Seminar Three: Theatrical Political Economies of Truth
Primary Readings
Michel
Foucault, Lectures on the Will to Know, Cours au Collège de France, 1981-1970-1971 ‘Oedipal Knowledge’.
Supplementary Readings
Giorgio
Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, Chapter
One, ‘The Two Paradigms,’ Chapter 8 ‘The Archaeology of Glory’ and, ‘The
Appendix’.
Walter
Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic
Drama, ‘George Steiner Introduction,’ and, ‘Trauerspiele and Tragedy.’
Guy
Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.
Words and Pictures / Stories
and Photographs
Jenny
Edkins
These
seminars will attempt a meditation on photographs: what they do or might do
politically. Participants should read Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1) beforehand. Our discussions will draw on Jacques
Rancière’s aesthetic politics (2) and Cathy Caruth’s reading of trauma (3). We
will consider the temporality of the photograph and its connection with trauma
time. Taking inspiration from John Berger’s ‘Stories’ (4), David Levi-Strauss’
discussion of documentary photography (5) and my discussion (6) of Chris
Marker’s La Jetée, (France: 1962), 29 mins., which
we will watch in class, we will look at the still photo and narration with
still photos. We will talk about a number of examples of aesthetic politics in
the photograph, which may include the work of Alfredo Jaar (particularly his
Rwanda sequence of works), Jean-Luc Nancy’s photo-essay ‘Georges’, the use of
the photo in the work of W G Sebald’s Austerlitz,
and the documentary photography of Sebastião Salgado. Participants are
encouraged to bring their own examples to discuss.* Finally, if there is time,
we will consider the face in the photograph—what might be special about the
portrait, and sets of portraits in particular—drawing on the work of Jean-Luc
Nancy.
*We
will hopefully be working in a room with powerpoint, so you can bring images on
pen drives etc.
Pre-reading
Roland Barthes, Camera
Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993) 119pp.
Jacques Rancière, ‘The
Distribution of the Sensible: Politics and Aesthetics’, in Jacques Rancière, The
Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by
Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 12-19. [8pp]
Cathy Caruth, ‘Trauma and
Experience: Introduction’, in Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 3-12. [10pp]
John Berger, ‘Stories’, in John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of
Telling (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 277-289. [12pp]
David Levi Strauss, ‘The
Documentary Debate: Aesthetic or Anaesthetic?’, in David Levi Strauss, Between
the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (New York: Aperture, 2003)
3-11. [9pp]
Jenny Edkins, 'Reflections
on Memory and the Future: Time and Trauma in Chris Marker's La Jetée'. Memory Studies
Forthcoming (2014). [12pp]
[Extracts 2-6—around 50 pages of reading in
all—will be made available to participants in advance of the School;
participants are advised to buy Camera
Lucida, available for around £5-£6/$11-$12]
For reference
Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The
Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 2002).
David
Campbell, “Salgado and the Sahel: Documentary Photography and
the Imaging of Famine”,
in Rituals of Mediation:
International Politics and Social Meaning, edited by Francois Debrix and
Cynthia Weber (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 69-96.
http://www.imaging-famine.org/papers/campbell_03.htm
Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Marguerite Duras and Alain Renais, 'Hiroshima
Mon Amour', (1961).
Jenny Edkins, 'Exposed Singularity'. Journal
for Cultural Research 9, no. 4 (2005): 359-86.
Jenny Edkins, 'Politics and Personhood:
Reflections on the Portrait Photograph'. Alternatives: Local, Global, Political
38, no. 2 (2013) forthcoming.
Jenny Edkins, 'Time, Personhood, Politics', in The
Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary Criticism, eds. Gert
Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone (London: Routledge, 2013)
forthcoming.
Adrian Kear, 'Traces of Presen7ce', in International
Politics and Performance: Critical Aesthetics and Creative Practice, eds.
Jenny Edkins and Adrian Kear (London: Routledge, 2013) forthcoming.
Chris Marker, La Jetee: Cine Roman (New
York: Zone Books, 1992).
Jean-Luc Nancy, 'The Look of the Portrait', in Multiple
Arts: The Muses II, ed. Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2006), 220-47. [Originally published as Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Regard Du
Portrait (Paris: Galilee, 2000).]
Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Georges’, in Multiple Arts:
The Muses II, ed. Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2006), 131-142.
Jay Prosser, Light in the Dark Room:
Photography and Loss (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of
Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel
Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004).
Sebastiao Salgado, The Children: Refugees
and Migrants (New York: Aperture, 2000).
Eric L Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke,
Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz. Translated by
Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2001).
David Levi Strauss, ‘A Sea of Griefs is not a
Proscenium: The Rwanda Projects of Alfredo Jaar’, in David Levi Strauss, Between
the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (New York: Aperture, 2003)
79-105.
Time
and Politics: Encountering the ‘Event’ in Poststructural Thought
Tom
Lundborg
The poststructural challenge is in
many respects a challenge to think differently about time. It is a challenge to think beyond assumptions about the
eternal cycles of cosmic movements, beyond the limits of a progressive
understanding of history, and beyond theological conceptions of time as
eschatology. The poststructural challenge is, moreover, a challenge to engage
seriously with the uncertainty and contingency of events, which, in their singularity elude teleology and
calculability. In this seminar series we will discuss what the poststructural
challenge of time and the event entails in more detail, and how it can be used
in order to construct a politics of time. Our primary focus will be on key
texts by Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault – philosophers who
in different ways have explored the concept of the event and its relevance for
thinking about time and politics.
Pre-reading
First seminar:
Deleuze, G., The Logic of Sense (London: Continuum,
2004). ‘First Series of Paradoxes of Pure Becoming’, ‘Second Series of
Paradoxes of Surface Effects’, ‘Tenth Series of the Ideal Game’, ‘Eleventh Series
of Nonsense’, ‘Twelfth Series of the Paradox’, ‘Fifteenth Series of
Singularities’, ‘Nineteenth Series of Humor’, ‘Twenty-First Series of the
Event’, ‘Twenty-Third Series of the Aion’, ‘Twenty-Fourth Series of the
Communication of Events’.
Deleuze, G.,
‘Control and Becoming’, in Negotiations: 1972–1990,
trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 169-176.
Second seminar:
Derrida, J.,
‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy,
trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1-28.
Derrida, J.,
‘Signature Event Context’, in Margins of
Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984),
304-330.
Derrida, J., ‘Structure,
Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass
(London: Routledge, 2005 [1967]), 351-370.
Derrida,
J.,
‘The Deconstruction of Actuality’, in Negotiations:
Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001, translated and edited by Elizabeth
Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 147-198.
Third seminar:
Deleuze, G., Negotiations:
1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995), Part 3 – Michel Foucault.
Foucault, M., ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected
Essays and Interviews, trans. D. F.
Bouchard and S. Simon, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139-164.
Foucault, M., ‘Truth and Power’, in The Essential Works of
Foucault, 1954-1984. Vol. 3: Power (London: Penguin,
2002), 111-133.
Foucault, M., ‘Interview with Michel Foucault’, in The Essential Works of
Foucault, 1954-1984. Vol. 3: Power, (London: Penguin, 2002), 239-297.
Unthinking IR: Culture,
Capital and Modernity
Himadeep
Muppidi
If colonial frameworks are constitutive of conventional
ways of thinking international relations, how does one re-world it from an
anti-colonial perspective? In this seminar, we will seek to move beyond certain
dominant and oppressive imaginations of global politics by thinking and talking
together, differently, about questions of culture, capital and modernity as
these come together to structure our multiple worlds.
Readings
Arjun
Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference, Princeton University Press, 2000.
Amitav
Ghosh, In an Antique Land: History in the
Guise of a Traveler’s Tale, Vintage Books, 1992.
Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline,
Columbia University Press, 2003.
Bernard
Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of
Knowledge: The British in India, Princeton University Press, 1996.
Ranajit
Guha, History at the Limit of
World-History, Columbia University Press, 2002.
Michael J Shapiro’s three
lectures
1)
War Crimes
This lecture is based on the first chapter in my war crimes
book project. I begin with a passage in Mathias Énard’s
novel Zone a long reflection by his
protagonist, Mirkovic, after seeing his former Croatian commander, Blaškić, on trial at The
Hague. Heeding Mikovic’s reflection on the knowledge practices and apparatuses
related to justice, I elaborate the war crimes-related justice dispositif, treating not only the moment
that is addressed in the cited passage from novel (but also the complex apparatuses
involved in the contemporary war crimes justice “circuses” and other relevant
events (and non-events), especially the forces involved in global arms
trafficking (I will have some images to show with this lecture, two of which
are from the film, Lord of War).
2)
Borderline Justice
This lecture is about the “war on drugs” as it is carried
out in the U.S. – Mexico border areas. The lecture treats literatures and films
that have provided what I call a “poesis of narco-trafficking” (and a genealogy
of artistic responses to borderline justice). Much of my emphasis is on the way
artistic texts challenge governmental “truth weapons,” the most significant
one, which I analyze at length being Gerardo Naranjo’s film Miss Bala. I end with a reflection on
how to conceive justice, given the facts of complicity between the justice dispositif, constituted by the official
war on drugs, and the crime dispositif,
as it unfolds in the process of narco-trafficking and contrast my mode of
analysis with the rationalistic, justice-as-fairness doctrines that have
emerged from the work of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin justice comes from a
model of equality in which a political arithmetic is the primary analytic.
Finally, I contrast their abstract individual with Bolivian President Evo
Morales’ coca grower. (I will show some footage from the film, Miss Bala with this lecture).
3)
Justice and the Archives
This lecture has as its primary texts a novel, Laszlo
Kraznihorkai’s War & War and
Linda Hatendorf’s documentary film featuring a Japanese street artist, The Cats of
Mirikitani. In the case of
the former text, the main protagonist is a self-described archivist who is
bringing a found (or invented) manuscript on war to the “center of the world,”
New York City in order to give it a permanence by loaded it onto the Internet.
In the later, the protagonist, Jimmie Mirikitani, turns out to have been a
victim of the U.S.’s internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry during WW II
(while some of his family were victims of the bombing of Hiroshima). His
drawings are about both historical episodes. The primary analytic of the
lecture is base on Gilles Deleuze’s lecture, “The Method of Dramatization.” The
Lecture ends with reflections on the genres and temporality of the Archives. (I
will show some footage of the Cats of
Mirikitani with this lecture).
Pre-reading
Charles
Bowden’s text on the US-Mexico drug war, Dreamland.
Gilles
Deleuze’s lecture, “The Method of Dramatization” (available on the web).
Mathias
Enard’s novel Zone.
Michel
Foucault’s lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics.
Laszlo
Krasznahorkai’s novel War & War.
Don
Winslow’s novel The Power of the Dog.
Other ‘Foucaults’ and the
politics of (scholarly) practice
Erzsebet
Strausz
How to read Foucault? And perhaps even more importantly,
why ask this question? These seminars engage with the politics of (scholarly)
practice through taking a closer look not only at what Foucault says in his diagnoses of the present
(such as what he identifies as the operations of e.g. biopolitics, governmentality
or sovereign power), but also what his scholarly practice expresses, performs and produces within the same discourses and
epistemic structures of modernity,
also as potential responses to such
diagnoses. Turning Foucault’s notion of productive power back on his own
scholarly work we will explore what vistas of resistance, sites of intervention
and modes of ethical relating to world, self and others may emerge from the
ways in which Foucault writes, reads, thinks and sees? The three seminars seek
to draw out and draw inspiration from three possible (and in equal part,
imaginary) portraits of Foucault – a topologist, a vitalist and someone who
cares for himself - that is, ‘Foucaults’ that are other both to the usual frames of disciplinary thinking and
perhaps, also to themselves. Our aim is to attempt to rethink politics of the
present through the poetics of practice and the actuality of what we do and how
we are right here, right now.
Seminars are structured around two core readings (the
essential one highlighted) and suggested readings that provide additional
context to the discussions. Participants are encouraged to think about what is political, what is poetic about their
(academic) practices in everyday life.
Pre-reading
First
Seminar: Working with space / Foucault as topologist
Core
readings:
Foucault, Michel, “Las
Meninas” in The Order of Things
(London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 1-18.
Foucault,
Michel, Speech Begins after Death,
Philippe Artières ed., (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013),
25-81. (Some excerpts will be provided)
Suggested
readings:
Foucault,
Michel, “Preface” in The Order of Things,
(London: Routledge, 2009), pp. xvi-xxvi.
Foucault,
Michel, “Different Spaces” in Aesthetics, Method, And Epistemology: Essential Works Of Foucault,
1954-1984, Volume 2, James D.
Faubion ed., (London: Penguin, 1994), 175-185.
Deleuze,
Gilles, Foucault, (New York:
Continuum, 2006).
Foucault,
Michel, Manet and the Object of Painting
(London: Tate, 2010).
Second
Seminar: Working through life / Foucault as vitalist
Core
readings:
Foucault, Michel, “Lives of
Infamous Men” in Power: Essential
Works Of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol 3, James D. Faubion ed.,
(London: Penguin, 1998), pp 157-175.
Foucault,
M. “The Mesh of Power” (lecture), available at http://viewpointmag.com/the-mesh-of-power/
OR
"Method"
Chapter from the History of Sexuality I,
(London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 92-102.
Suggested
readings:
Foucault,
M. “Governmentality”, in Power: Essential
Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume 3, James D. Faubion ed., (London:
Penguin, 1994), pp. 201-222.
Foucault,
M. “The Order of Discourse”, in Untying
the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, Robert Young ed., (London:
Routledge, 1981),
Foucault, Michel. “Interview with Michel Foucault”. In
Power: Essential Works Of Foucault, 1954-1984, Volume 3, edited
by James D. Faubion, 239-297, (London: Penguin, 1994), pp 239-297
Third
Seminar: Working on subjectivity / Foucault’s care for himself
Core
readings:
Foucault, Michel, “My Body,
This Paper, This Fire” in Essential
Works: Aesthetics, Vol 1, (London: Penguin, 1998), pp- 393-417.
Foucault,
Michel, “The ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom: An interview”
in The Final Foucault, Bernauer and Rasmussen
eds, (Cambridge, MA:MIT, 1988), pp 1-20.
Suggested
readings:
Foucault,
Michel, The Government of Self and
Others: Lectures at the Collège the France 1982-1983, (New York: Picador,
2010).
Foucault, Michel, The
Courage of Truth: Lectures at the Collège the France 1983-1984, (New York:
Picador, 2010).
Foucault,
Michel, The Use of Pleasure: The
History of Sexuality 2, (London: Penguin, 1992).
Biopolitics, thanatopolitics,
zoopolitics
Nick Vaughan-Williams
These sessions explore the biopolitical turn in
social and political thought, and consider some of the implications for the
study of international politics. We begin by examining the concept of
biopolitics as paradigmatically outlined by Michel Foucault. From here we
assess prominent engagements with the Foucauldian frame along both ‘negative’
and ‘affirmative’ lines, as found in the work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto
Esposito. Finally, we turn to Jacques Derrida’s critique of biopolitics and his
zoopolitical alternative. Our discussions will focus on questions relating to
sovereignty, subjectivity, and borders (particularly the human/animal
distinction). We will investigate these questions against the backdrop of
participants' own research interests.
Pre-reading
G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,
Trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
‘Introduction’; Part Two: ‘1 Homo Sacer’, ‘3 Sacred Life’; Part Three: The Camp
as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern’.
J. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign: Volume 1
(2001-2), Trans. G. Bennington (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2008). December 12, 2001; January 16, 2002; March 13, 2002; March 20,
2002; March 27, 2002.
R. Esposito, Bíos:
Biopolitics and Philosophy, Trans. T. Campbell (Minneapolis and London: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008). ‘Introduction’, ‘1 The Enigma of Biopolitics’, ‘2 The
Paradigm of Immunization’.
M. Foucault The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality Volume 1, Trans. R. Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998).
‘Part Five: Right of Death and Power Over Life’.
M. Foucault Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the
Collège de France, 1975-76. (London: Allen Lane, 2003). Chapter 11 (17
March 1976).
Additional
suggested reading
C. Blencowe, Biopolitical Experience: Foucault, Power, and Positive Critique
(London and New York: Palgrave, 2011).
T.
Campbell, Improper Life: Technology and
Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben (Minneapolis and London: University
of Minnesota Press, 2011).
M. Coleman and K. Grove,
‘Biopolitics, Biopower, and the Return of Sovereignty’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27(3) (2009), pp.
489-507.
E. Dauphinee and C. Masters (Eds)
The Logics of Biopower and the War on
Terror: Living, Dying, Surviving (London and New York: Palgrave, 2007).
F. Debrix and A. Barder, Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, Violence, and
Horror in World Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).
M. Dillon and L. Lobo-Guerrero,
‘The Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century’, Review of International Studies, 32(2) (2008) pp. 265–92.
M. Dillon
and J. Reid, The Liberal Way of War: Killing
to Make Life Live (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).
J. Edkins,
V. Pin-Fat, and M. J. Shapiro, Sovereign
Lives: Power in Global Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).
F. Lentzos and N. Rose,
‘Governing Insecurity: Contingency Planning, Protection, Resilience’, Economy and Society, 38(2) (2009), pp.
230–54.
T. Lundborg and N. Vaughan-Williams, 'There’s
More to Life than Biopolitics: Resilience, Critical Infrastructure Planning,
and Molecular Security’, International Political Sociology, 5(4)
(December 2011), pp. 367-383.
C. Masters, ‘Femina Sacra: The
War on/of Terror’, Women, and the Feminine’, Security Dialogue, 40(1) (2009), pp. 29–49.
A. Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’,
Trans. L. Meintjes, Public Culture
15(1) (2005), pp. 11-40.
C. Minca, ‘Giorgio Agamben and
the New Biopolitical Nomos’, Geografiska
Annaler, 88B(4) (2006), pp. 387-403.
J. Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life
Struggles, Liberal Modernity, and the Defence of Logistical Societies
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
N. Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in
Biopolitical Times (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2009).
N. Vaughan-Williams, ‘The Shooting of Jean
Charles de Menezes: New Border Politics?’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political,
32(2), (April-June 2007), pp. 177-195.
N. Vaughan-Williams, ‘The
Generalised Biopolitical Border? Reconceptualising the Limits of Sovereign
Power’, Review of International Studies,
35 (2009), pp. 729–49.
C. Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Critique and the International
Rob Walker
Rob Walker
“Critique” has become both fashionable and elusive, in claims about international relations as in many social sciences and humanities more generally. Consequently, I would like to engage participants in discussion about (i) what they understand critique to mean in various intellectual/political traditions, (ii) what they think the effect of claims about critical theories of international relations has been, (iii) whether they think the international poses any specific problems/opportunities for critique, and (iv) whether they think prevailing understandings of what it means to be critical remain persuasive.
Pre-reading
No specific pre-reading is required, but participants will
be expected to have examined the various ways in which the claim to critique
has been deployed in various literatures, both in international relations
theory and in contemporary social, cultural and political theory more
generally. As most forms of critique acknowledge a debt to Kant’s resistance to
dogma and his concern with the limits of human knowledge, it will also be
useful to have some sense of Kant’s significance -- positive and negative -- as
a canonical and still provocative thinker.
Obscene Politics: Eroticism,
the Body and the Visual as a Method
Andreja
Zevnik
These sessions will engage
with the ‘obscene’ aspects of politics; those, which remain unrepresented,
abandoned, discarded or are for their traumatic potential tabooed. We will look
into conceptual frameworks of obscenity and ask questions such as how and why
is something deemed obscene, how is one to study obscenity and how can
‘obscene’ operate as a method. First we will look into discussions about the
body as a scape with the capacity to
re-write political boundaries negotiated on the binaries of
inclusion/exclusion, self/other; then we will move on to look at what is at
stake when these boundaries are contested and transgressed; and finally we will
finish by considering ‘obscenity’ as a method of transgression.
Participants are encouraged to
familiarise themselves with the work of performance artist Marina Abramovic;
artist and painter Marlene Dumas and photojournalist Stanley Greene. Examples
of their work will be brought in class for discussion, however some prior
knowledge/awareness of their work will be welcomed. Participants are also
encouraged to bring their own work or work they consider relevant for the
discussion.
Suggested pre-reading
Giorgio
Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal
(Stanford: Stanford University press, 2004).
Georges
Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 – 1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
See the following essays: The Use Value of DAF de Sade; Sacrifices; The
Sorcerer’s Apprentice; The Practice of Joy before Death; The College of
Sociology. They can all be accessed on line from different sources.
n
Story of the Eye (London: Penguin Books, 2001).
Jean Baudrillard, The
Conspiracy of Art (New York: Semiotext(e), 2005): 25 – 35; 43 – 87; 181 –
211.
Jacques
Lacan, Écrits, Bruce Fink ed. (London
and New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006). See: ‘Kant with Sade’, 645 –
70; and ‘Science and Truth’, 726 – 744.
Pierre
Legendre, ‘Introduction to the Theory of the Image: Narcissus and the Other in
the Mirror’, Law and Critique, Vol,
VIII, no. 1 (1997): 3 – 35.
Michael J. Shapiro, Studies in Trans-disciplinary
Method: after the aesthetic turn (London: Routledge, 2012).
Kaja
Silverman, ‘Fassbinder and Lacan: A reconsideration of gaze, look and image’, Camera Obscura, 1989: 54 – 84.
Linda
Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess’, Film Quarterly, vol. 44, nr. 4 (1991): 2 – 13.
Further suggested reading:
Giorgio
Agamben, The Man Without Content
(Stanford: Stanford University press, 2004).
Georges
Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986).
Maurice Blanchot, Lautreamont and Sade (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004)
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’ in Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1991):
15 – 135. (Any edition)
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: an analysis of pollution and taboo (London:
Routledge, 2002).
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison (London, Penguin:
1991).
§ The
History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self
Vol III (London:
Penguin Books, 1990).
Jean-Luc
Nancy, The Ground of the Image (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2005).
Antonio Negri, Art and Multitude (London: Polity Press 2011)
Pierre Klossowski, Sade My Neighbour (Quartet Books, 1992).
Santner.
Eric, The Royal Remains: the people’s two
bodies and the endgames of sovereignty (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Scarry,
Elaine, The body in pain: the making and
the unmaking of the world (Oxford Paperbacks, 1988).
Kaja
Silverman, ‘Masochism and Male Subjectivity’, Camera Obscura, vol. 6, nr.2, 1988: 30 – 67.
Sontag,
Susan Against Interpretation and Other
Essays (Penguin Classics, 2009).
Leopold,
Von Sacher Masoch, Venus in Furs
(Dover Publications, 2013).
Linda
Williams, Figures of Desire: a theory and
analysis of surrealist film (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1981): Chapter 1: The Image. (can be accessed online)
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