What is critical theory, and whence the notion of critique as a practical stance towards the world? Using these questions as a point of departure, this course takes critical theory as its field of inquiry. Part of the course will be devoted to investigating what critique is, starting with the etymological and conceptual affinity it shares with crisis: since the Enlightenment, so one line of argument goes, all grounds for knowledge are subject to criticism, which is understood to generate a sense of escalating historical crisis culminating in a radical renewal of the intellectual and social order. We will explore the efficacy of modern critical thought, and the concept of critique’s efficacy, by examining a series of attempts to narrate and amplify states of crisis – and correspondingly transform key concepts such as self, will, time, and world – in order to provoke a transformation of society. The other part of the course will be oriented towards understanding current critical movements as part of the Enlightenment legacy of critique, and therefore as studies in the practical implications of critical readings. Key positions in critical discourse will be discussed with reference to the socio-political conditions of their formation and in the context of their provenance in the history of philosophy, literature, and cultural theory. Required readings will include works by Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Benjamin and others, with suggested readings and references drawn from a variety of source materials ranging from literary and philosophical texts to visual images, film, and architecture. You are invited to work on your individual interests with respect to the readings.
Critique, krinein, crisis (Koselleck, Adorno)
Reinhart Koselleck, “Crisis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67.2 (2006), 357-400.
—, Chapters 7 and 8, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988 [German original, 1959].
Adorno and Horkheimer, "The Concept of Enlightenment," in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1989), pp. 3-42.
Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984: 32-50.
—, The Politics of Truth. New York: Semiotext(e), 1997.
Friedrich Hölderlin, “Nature and Art or Saturn and Jupiter,” in Hyperion and Selected Poems. Ed. by Eric Santner. Translated by Michael Hamburger. New York: Continuum, 1990: 150-151.
Judgment and Imagination (Kant)
Immanuel Kant, “Preface [A and B],” in Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998: 99-124.
—, “Preface” and “Introduction,” in Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge UP, 1996), pp. 139-149.
—, §§1-5, 59-60 of Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 89-96, 225-230.
—, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Kant: Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 (2nd ed.): 41-53, 273.
—, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? [1784],” in Practical Philosophy. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999: 11-22.
Immanuel Kant, "Analytic of the Sublime," in Critique of Judgment. Translated by James Creed Meredith; revised, edited, and introduced by Nicholas Walker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007: 75-164.
Theodor Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (2001 [1959])
Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (2004)
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1992)
Geoffrey Bennington, “Kant’s Open Secret”, Theory, Culture and Society 28.7-8(2011): 26-40.
J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (1992)
Graham Bird, The Revolutionary Kant (2006)
Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche (1990, 2003)
Howard Caygill, The Kant Dictionary (2000)
Ernst Cassirer, Kant's Life and Thought (1981)
Gilles Deleuze, Kant's Critical Philosophy (1984)
Will Dudley and Kristina Engelhard (eds.) Immanuel Kant: Key Concepts (2010)
Paul Guyer, Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays (2003)
Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1997)
Laura Hengehold, The BODY Problematic: Political Imagination in Kant and Foucault (2007)
Otfried Höffe, Immanuel Kant (1994)
Jean-François Lyotard, L’Enthousiasme: La critique kantienne de l’histoire. Paris: L’Éditions Galilée, 1986.
Rudolf Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermaneutic Import of the Critique of Judgment (1990)
Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking (2003)
Andrea Rehberg and Rachel Jones (eds.), The Matter of Critique: Readings in Kant’s Philosophy (2000)
Philip Rothfield (ed.), Kant after Derrida (2003)
Rei Terada, Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (2009)
Yirmiahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (1989)
Recognition and the Other (Hegel)
G.W.F. Hegel, “The Truth of Self-Certainty” and “Lordship and Bondage,” in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Terry Pinkard. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018: 102-116.
—, “The Art-Religion,” in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Terry Pinkard. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018: 403-430.
G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction [§§1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 8], in Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Translated by T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975: 1-14; 22-55; 69-90.
Stuart Barnett (ed.), Hegel after Derrida (2001)
Frederick Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (1993)
Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009)
Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (2011)
Rebecca Comay and John McCumber (eds.), Endings: Questions of Memory in Hegel and Heidegger (1999)
Eva Geulen, The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor after Hegel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
Werner Hamacher, “(The End of Art with the Mask),” in Stuart Barnett (ed.), Hegel after Derrida. London and New York: Routledge, 1998: 105-130.
Werner Hamacher, “The Reader’s Supper: A Piece of Hegel,” trans. Timothy Bahti, diacritics 11.2 (1981): 52-67.
H.S. Harris, Hegel: Phenomenology and System (1995)
Stephen Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History (2005)
Stephen Houlgate, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (2013)
Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations (2010)
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.
Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (2001)
Karl Marx, “I: Feuerbach,” The German Ideology, in Collected Works vol. 5. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976: 27-93.
Karl Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach," available online (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm)
... and Repetition (Marx)
Karl Marx, “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859], in Collected Works vol. 29. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976: 261-165.
—, “Postface to the Second Edition” and “Chapter 1: The Commodity,” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. by B. Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1990: 95-103 and 125-177.
Louis Althusser, For Marx (1969)
Hannah Arendt, “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought”, Social Research 69.2 (2002): 273-319.
Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx (1995, 2007)
Ernst Bloch, On Karl Marx (1971)
Andrew Chitty and Martin McIvor (eds.), Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy (2009)
Simon Choat, Marx Through Post-Structuralism: Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze (2010)
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.
Werner Hamacher, “Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida’s Specters of Marx” (1999)
Jean Hyppolite, Studies on Marx and Hegel (1969)
Sarah Kofman, Camera Obscura: Of Ideology (1998)
Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction (1980)
Michael Sprinker (ed.), Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1999, 2008)
Moishe Postone, History and Heteronomy: Critical Essays (2009)
Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (1993)
Jacques Rancière, “The Concept of ‘Critique’ and the ‘Critique of Political Economy’ (from the 1844 Manuscript to Capital)”, Economy and Society 5.3 (1976): 352-376.
Tom Rockmore, Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx (2002)
Gareth Stedman-Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016)
Will to Becoming Otherwise (Nietzsche)
Friedrich Nietzsche, "Preface" and "First Treatise," in On the Genealogy of Morality. Trans. by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Indianopolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1998: 1-33.
Ascetic Ideal and Eternal Return (Nietzsche)
Friedrich Nietzsche, "Second Treatise" and "Third Treatise," in On the Genealogy of Morality. Trans. by Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Indianopolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1998: 35-118.
Friedrich Nietzsche, §§341-342 of The Gay Science
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Vision and Riddle” and “The Convalescent,” in Thus Spake Zarathustra III
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in: The Birth of Tragedy and other writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life,” in: Untimely Meditations. Trans. by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. by D. F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977: 139-164.
R. Kevin Hill, Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of his Thought (2003)
Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. Trans. by Gillian C. Gill. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. Trans. by Jon R. Snyder. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.
Alenka Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (2003)
Repetition Compulsion (Freud)
Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” [excerpts], in Peter Gay (ed.), The Freud Reader. London: Vintage, 1995: 594-625.
Theodor Adorno, “Revisionist Psychoanalysis,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 40.3 (2014): 326-338.
Louis Althusser, Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan (1996)
Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love (2012)
Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (1986)
Rebecca Comay, “Resistance and Repetition: Freud and Hegel,” Research in Phenomenology 45 (2015): 237-266.
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995)
Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1987)
Mladen Dolar, “Freud and the Political,” Unbound 4.15 (2008): 15-29.
Sarah Kofman, Freud and Fiction (1991)
Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious; or Reason after Freud”, in Écrits: A Selection. Trans. by A. Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977: 146-175.
Catherine Malabou, “Plasticity and Elasticity in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Diacritics 37.4 (2007): 78-85.
Jean-Luc Nancy, "System of (Kantian) Pleasure (With a Freudian Postscript)," in Kant after Derrida. Ed. by Phil Rothfield. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003: 127-141.
Angus Nicholls and Martin Liebscher (eds.), Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought (2010)
Charles Sheperdson, Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (2000)
Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. London: Verso, 2012 [reprint].
Crisis of European Humankind (Husserl)
Edmund Husserl, §§1-7 and §§10-21, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. by David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970: 2-18; 60-84.
Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity [Vienna Lecture],” in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. by David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970: 269-299.
Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Trans. by Pascale Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992: 4-83.
Paul de Man, “Criticism and Crisis,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971: 3-19.
James Dodd, Crisis and Reflection: An Essay on Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences (2004)
Burt C. Hopkins, The Philosophy of Husserl (2011)
David Hyder and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Science and the Life-World: Essays on Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences (2010)
Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (2002)
Dermot Moran, The Husserl Dictionary (2012)
Paul Valéry, "Notes on the Greatness and Decline of Europe” and “The European,” in History and Politics. Trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Matthews. New York: Bollingen, 1962: 228; 311-12.
David Woodruff Smith, Husserl (2007)
Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (1995)
Crisis-Proof Experience (Benjamin)
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings vol. 4. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003: 313-355.
Walter Benjamin, "Experience and Poverty"
—, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”
—, “Theses on the Concept of History”
—, “Epistemo-Critical Prologue,” in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. by John Osborne. London and New York: Verso, 2003: 27-56.
—, “Convolute J,” The Arcades Project
—, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (2006)
Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, “Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings vol. 4 (1999).
Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil; The Painter of Modern Life
Ian Balfour, “Reversal, Quotation (Benjamin’s History)”, Modern Language Notes 106.3 (1991): 622-647.
Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (1997)
Tom Gunning, “The Exterior as Intérieur: Benjamin’s Optical Detective,” boundary 2 30.1 (2003).
Werner Hamacher, “Now: Benjamin on Historical Time” (2001; 2005)
Julian Wolfreys (ed.), Modern European Criticism and Theory: A Critical Guide (2006)
Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2001)
Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism (2002)
Andrew Bowie, Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas (2003)
Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (2002)
Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (2001)
Eric Matthews, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy (1996)
Jonathan Simons (ed.), From Kant to Lévi-Strauss: The Background to Contemporary Critical Theory (2002)
- You will have a grasp of the broad trends in the development of critical theory.
- You will have a good understanding of how different modern philosophical traditions from German Idealism to Phenomenology inform the different strains of critical theory.
- You will be able to expound and analyse the ways in which a range of different writers and tendencies in the history of modern thought conceive of the specificity of critique.
- You will have a sound grasp of the primary and secondary literatures in critical theory, both on general issues and specific thinkers or schools.
- You will be able to use the ideas and texts explored in the module to inform your readings in critical theoretical texts.
- Students should show a clear command of how their chosen thinker(s) and texts relate to the broader trajectories of critical theory.
- Students should show a detailed critical knowledge of at least two of the module’s key thinkers or theoretical tendencies.
- Students should show a knowledge and capacity to use a good range of secondary literature on both general issues in the field and on the specific thinkers and texts they address.
- Students should be able to read the relevant texts from both critical and genealogical perspectives.
- Students should demonstrate their capacity to develop a distinctive and coherent interpretative and analytical perspective on their chosen subject.
