Summer School 2026

Nine courses taught Jan - Feb

The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy is proud to present the Summer School 2026 curriculum.  All courses are 10 hours in length.  As always significant discounts apply for those enrolling in multiple courses. If you have any questions which aren't in our FAQs please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Summer Programme

 

Course Descriptions

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Information Aesthetics

Lecturer: Ashley Woodward

Contemporary critical discussions around issues in aesthetics that have emerged with newer technologies – such as CGI, AI art, and algorithmic techniques for art evaluation – usually take place without being historically informed by past relevant theories and debates. This course aims to fill some of these gaps by providing an exploratory historical survey of several approaches to ‘information aesthetics.’ ‘Information’ in this sense refers to the Mathematical Theory of Communication developed by Claude Shannon in 1948, which made possible and continues to govern information technologies. Since its emergence there have been a number of attempts to apply it to problems in philosophical aesthetics and in the arts quite generally. The first notable application occurred in the 1950s and ‘60s in Germany and France with the works of Max Bense and Abraham Moles. They sought to use information theory to develop a rational and objective aesthetics by considering the statistical measure of information as a mathematical measure of aesthetic value. Although it influenced many artists and critics at the time, it had little lasting influence and is largely forgotten today. Also in the 1950s and ‘60s, French philosophers Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon developed inventive applications of the notion of information to many philosophical problems. While they were more interested in metaphysical issues, they both made forays into the realm of aesthetics. These contributions were mostly unnoticed at the time, but are now being rediscovered. More recently, theorists such as Jason A. Hoelscher and Cecile Malaspina have approached information aesthetics from a different angle, focusing on the indeterminacy in an information system as what best expresses the unpredictability and surprise of uncompromisingly original artworks. While the course will focus on the historical substance of the philosophical theories, consideration will be given to how information aesthetics may import for the arts that have developed along with information technologies.

Course Schedule

Lecture 1: Introduction to ‘Information,’ ‘Aesthetics,’ and ‘Information Aesthetics’

This lecture will introduce some basic concepts of Claude Shannon’s Information Theory (also known as the Mathematical Theory of Communication, or MTC), such as entropy as the probabilistic measure of amount of information. It will also introduce some basic ideas in philosophical aesthetics, emphasising its problematic nature in the history of philosophy, especially in relation to epistemology (theory of knowledge). This will provide a grounding for understanding what is at stake in informational theories of aesthetics. This lecture will also introduce the basic assumptions and aims of the information aesthetics of Bense and Moles.

Reading

• Frieder Nake, “Information Aesthetics: An Heroic Experiment,” Journal of Mathematics and the Arts 6.2 (2012): 65-75.

Lecture 2: Generative Aesthetics: Max Bense and the Stuttgart School

This lecture will provide an introductory overview of the first emergence of information aesthetics, with the German philosopher Max Bense (1910-1990) and his followers – such as Helmar Frank (1933-2013) and Rul Gunzenhäuser (1933-2018) – collectively known as the Stuttgart School. Bense identified two phases of the artwork, its generation by the artist (hence a focus on the ‘generative’ aspect of aesthetics), and secondly its appreciation by the audience or critic. Bense incorporated semiotics with information theory, and focused on artworks (such as images and texts) as arrangements of elementary signs in a complex ‘supersign’ with a calculable information measure.

Reading

• Max Bense, “The Projects of Generative Aesthetics,” in Cybernetics, Art, and Ideas, J. Reichardt, ed., Studio Vista, London, 1971, pp. 57-60.

Lecture 3: Information Aesthetics: Abraham Moles

The third lecture will introduce the second founder of information aesthetics, French engineer and philosopher Abraham A. Moles (1920-1992). Moles proposed to understand aesthetic information as a counterpart to semantic information: while semantic (meaningful) information concerns the content of the message, the aesthetic information concerns how the message appears. While semantic information is indifferent to its supports, aesthetic information is specific to them, and untranslatable into different means of appearing. Similarly, Moles distinguished information value (relevant to the aesthetic judgement of a message) from the objective information measure. Yet he proposed a relation between them: when information measure is very low (redundancy) or very high (unpredictability), the value of the work is likely to be judged as low. A high-value work is likely to be somewhere in between, neither banal (informationally redundant) nor chaotic (informationally unpredictable). 

Reading

• Excerpts from Abraham Moles, Information Theory and Esthetic Perception (U of Illinois Press, 1968 [1958]).

Lecture 4: Aesthetics and French Philosophy of Information: Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon

Lecture four will cover two French philosophers whose works were long obscure, but are now becoming known as useful resources for contemporary issues surrounding information technologies. Raymond Ruyer (1902-1987) and Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) both developed early responses and creative extensions of information theory via critical engagements with cybernetics. Each proposed original ways of understanding information which, they believed, better fulfilled the aims of cybernetics and better responded to philosophical requirements. For Ruyer, an adequate theory of information must combine the psychological and physical meanings of the term, which metaphysically requires appeal to a ‘trans-spatial’ realm beyond physical space-time. For Simondon, information should be generalised as ‘the formula for individuation’ in order to account for all processes of ontogenesis, that is, how things become what they are. Both philosophers extended they investigations of information and technology to questions of aesthetics. Ruyer considered what the idea of the ‘artist’s message’ might be after information theory, and Simondon sought to transform culture to overcome the alienating relation we often have to technology, with the idea of information and a ‘techno-aesthetics.’

Reading

• Raymond Ruyer, “Quasi-information, Psychologism, and Culturalism,” trans. Ashley Woodward (to be supplied)
• Gilbert Simondon, “On Techno-Aesthetics,” trans. Arne De Boever Parrhesia 14 (2012): 1-8.

Lecture 5: Recent Aesthetics of Information: Jason A. Hoelscher and Cecile Malaspina

The final lecture will concern some much more recent work which applies information theory to issues in aesthetics, and does so in a way at odds with the aims of the original information aesthetics of Bense and Moles. While the earlier schools of information aesthetics were concerned to place aesthetics on a more securely objective and scientific footing, these recent thinkers attempt instead to show how the traditional ‘humanistic’ concerns of the arts – with meaning as surprise and unpredictability – can be used to reconceive information theory for aesthetics. Jason A. Hoelscher proposes that art may be understood as information in a mode of indeterminacy, as maintaining a state ‘in formation’ without final resolution. Art is more concerned with proposing questions and maintaining uncertainty than with informational messages conceived as answers. Cecile Malaspina underlines this indeterminacy in information theory in a way which has implications for aesthetics by focusing on noise. In information theory, noise is the name for the unwanted distortions (as produced for example by electrical interference) in a message. Yet Malaspina argues that it may also be understood as having a morphogenetic value; that is, being able to function as the source of the formation and transformation of forms. 

Reading

• Excerpts from Jason A. Hoelscher, Art as Information Ecology: Artworks, Artworlds, and Complex Systems Aesthetics (Duke UP, 2021) 
• Excerpts from Cecile Malaspina, An Epistemology of Noise (Bloomsbury, 2018).

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The Australian Feminist Philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz and Gatens

Lecturer: Finola Laughren

Inspired by Claire Colebrook’s claim that Genevieve Lloyd, Elizabeth Grosz and Moira Gatens together make up a distinctive “Australian” feminism, this course aims to introduce students to the works of these three feminist philosophers. Each in their own (overlapping) ways, Lloyd, Grosz and Gatens theorise the body differently to the linguistic approach made so famous by Judith Butler and of near doxa status within contemporary circles of feminist theory. Lloyd, Grosz and Gatens attempt, like Butler, to theorise subjectivity beyond questioning women’s essential sameness or difference to men. Unlike Butler, however, for whom the body is an effect of representation, each of these Australian feminist philosophers theorises the body as ‘possessing a force and being that marks the character of representation as such’ (Colebrook, 2000, p. 77). But what is this force, exactly? And what is this being? In this course, we will respond to these and other related questions through engagement with Lloyd’s The Man of Reason, Grosz’s Volatile Bodies and Gatens’ Imaginary Bodies. This course does not intend to make any definitive claims about an Australian feminist philosophy ‘canon’ but rather seeks to increase awareness of, and access to, the intellectual contributions of three important Australian feminist philosophers.

Week one: The Man of Reason

Required readings

• Lloyd, G. (1993). The man of reason : male and female in Western philosophy (Second edition.). University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203423240
  

Recommended readings

• Lloyd, G. (1989). Woman as other: Sex, gender and subjectivity. Australian Feminist Studies, 4(10), 13–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.1989.9961649 
• Colebrook, C. (2000). From Radical Representations to Corporeal Becomings: The Feminist Philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens. Hypatia, 15(2), 76–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2000.tb00315.x 

Week two: Volatile Bodies I

Required readings

• Grosz, E. A. (1994). Refiguring Bodies. In Volatile bodies : toward a corporeal feminism. Allen & Unwin.
• Grosz, E. (1987). Notes towards a corporeal feminism. Australian Feminist Studies, 2(5), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.1987.9961562  

Recommended readings

• Butler, J. (1990/2007). Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire. In Gender Trouble. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203824979-3 
• Colebrook, C. (2000). From Radical Representations to Corporeal Becomings: The Feminist Philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens. Hypatia, 15(2), 76–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2000.tb00315.x 

Week three: Volatile Bodies II

Required readings

• Grosz, E. A. (1994). Sexed Bodies. In Volatile bodies : toward a corporeal feminism. Allen & Unwin.
• Gross, E. (1986). [Rev. of Irigaray and sexual difference]. Australian Feminist Studies, 1(2), 63–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164650.1986.10382925

Recommended readings

• Butler, J. (1993). Introduction. In Bodies that matter : on the discursive limits of “sex.” Routledge.
• Braidotti, R. (1993). Embodiment, Sexual Difference, and the Nomadic Subject. Hypatia, 8(1), 1–13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3810298 
• Colebrook, C. (2000). From Radical Representations to Corporeal Becomings: The Feminist Philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens. Hypatia, 15(2), 76–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2000.tb00315.x 

Week four: Imaginary Bodies I

Required readings

• Gatens, M. (1996). A critique of the sex/gender distinction. In Imaginary Bodies. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203418659-2
• Gatens, M. (1996). Corporeal representation in/and the body politic. In Imaginary Bodies. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203418659-3 
• Gatens, M. (1996). Woman and her double(s): Sex, gender and ethics. In Imaginary Bodies. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203418659-4 

Recommended readings

• Gatens, M. (1991). Feminism and philosophy : perspectives on difference and equality. Polity.
• Colebrook, C. (2000). From Radical Representations to Corporeal Becomings: The Feminist Philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens. Hypatia, 15(2), 76–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2000.tb00315.x 

Week five: Imaginary Bodies II

Required readings

• Gatens, M. (1996). Towards a feminist philosophy of the body. In Imaginary Bodies. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203418659-6 
• Gatens, M. (1996). Epilogue. In Imaginary Bodies. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203418659-13 

Recommended readings

• Gatens, M. (1991). Feminism and philosophy : perspectives on difference and equality. Polity. 
• Colebrook, C. (2000). From Radical Representations to Corporeal Becomings: The Feminist Philosophy of Lloyd, Grosz, and Gatens. Hypatia, 15(2), 76–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2000.tb00315.x

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Heidegger’s Nietzsche

Lecturer: Ingo Farin

One possible access to Heidegger’s changing thought can be gained by analysing his changing relation to Nietzsche. As a theology student Heidegger had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the ascending star of Nietzsche. But he already was positively impressed by Nietzsche in 1909, and one can argue that his break with Christianity and theology was influenced by Nietzsche. There are positive references to Nietzsche in early Heidegger’s work, including Being and Time and his (in)famous speech on “The Self-assertion of the German University” in 1933. However, from the mid-1930s Heidegger becomes increasingly critical of Nietzsche, interpreting National Socialism, and, more broadly, modern industrial society, technology, culture, and art as deeply implicated in what Nietzsche describes as the will to power. Heidegger’s rejection of modernity is cast in terms of his Nietzsche critique, delivered in his Nietzsche lectures and seminars between 1936 and 1946. But that still leaves many questions open. Is Heidegger’s Nietzsche a strawman? Was Heidegger an active nihilist around 1933? Is Heidegger’s own version of overcoming metaphysics and nihilism a “parallel action” to Nietzsche’s? Does Nietzsche’s counsel “to be faithful to the earth” play a role in Heidegger’s Fourfold? Both Nietzsche and Heidegger are extremely unsettling philosophers, hostile to many aspects of modernity, and yet, they are committed to an entirely new, original, and modern form of philosophizing. In what sense are Nietzsche and Heidegger still relevant today?         

Course Schedule

Week One: From Heidegger’s early ambivalent stance towards Nietzsche to his qualified endorsement.

Texts

• “All Souls’ Moods” (1909),
• “War Triduum in Messkirch” (1915),
• the Nietzsche quotation in Being and Time,
• “The Self-Assertion of the German University.”  

Week Two: Heidegger’s Critique of Nietzsche.

Texts

• “Nietzsche’s Word ‘God is dead’ (1943),
• Nietzsche’s “Madman” from The Gay Science,
• excerpts from Bernhard Welte’s oration “Seeking and Finding” on occasion of Heidegger’s funeral May 28th 1976.  

Week Three: Heidegger’s Nietzsche Lectures (I) “The Will to Power as Art” & “The Will to Power as Knowledge.” 

Week Four: Heidegger’s Nietzsche Lectures (II). “European Nihilism,” “Nietzsche’s Metaphysics,” “Metaphysics as History of Being.” 

Week Five: Heidegger as Nietzschean?

Texts

• Heidegger, “Overcoming of Metaphysics,”
• Habermas, “The Undermining of Western Rationalism through the Critique of Metaphysics: Martin Heidegger” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
• Excerpts from Foucault on Critique and Enlightenment.           

Some familiarity with Heidegger and Nietzsche would be helpful, but this is course is not a master class in Nietzsche or Heidegger studies. All are welcome who want to discuss the intricate but fascinating story of Heidegger’s philosophical attempt to come to grips with Nietzsche.  

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From Invisible Subjects to Whole People: Debates in Social Reproduction Theory

Lecturer: Paddy Gordon

For Marx, “to be radical is to grasp things by the root…the root is man [sic] himself”. For Marxist feminist Lise Vogel, “beneath the serious social, psychological, and ideological phenomena of women’s oppression lies a material root” which “Marxism has never adequately analysed”. From this lacuna in Marx’s work proceeded materialist analyses of feminised domestic and caring labour: social reproduction theory. 

Our philosophical premise is that social reproduction theory can ultimately be understood as a theory of the subject – and thus of subjectification under capitalism – yet the course also has a political remit. Social reproduction theory remains vital for bringing to light the elided labour and invisible subjects who maintain and reproduce capitalism, but we are obviously still far overcoming capital or patriarchy, let alone becoming what Juliet Mitchell called “whole people”. As subjects of an increasingly authoritarian capitalism, what resources might social reproduction theory offer for resistance?

Proceeding from Marx and Engels to Nancy Fraser and Sophie Lewis via Angela Davis and Silvia Federici, the course will trace social reproduction theory’s historical development and contemporary iterations; readings focus on thinkers in dialogue with each other. The role of historically feminised and unwaged labour in the reproduction of capitalist social relations is a key site of investigation: we will also consider notions of the family, the child and carework. Contemporary social reproduction theory involves imagining how collective reproductive labour might be re-directed towards a society where radical caring relations supplant capitalist exploitation and patriarchal oppression. The abolition of the family and the liberation of children underpin such utopian visions, yet we must know the history of our social relations and how our labour reproduces them before we can think beyond them.

Course Schedule

Week 1 – Feminised Labour

Social reproduction theory developed from gaps in orthodox Marxism, as feminists sought to bring the historically feminised and culturally elided labour of housework and carework to the surface. They demonstrated such labour’s indispensability for the reproduction of both capitalist subjects and a capitalist social formation. Although Siliva Federici highlighted that “housework was under Marx and Engel’s theoretical horizon”, Marxism remains indispensable for conceiving of “social reproduction theory” as a philosophical tradition. To begin, we examine what human labour is, as we trace the emergence of feminised labour – often conceived as work – as a distinct site of theoretical investigation and political struggle. Texts by Juliet Mitchell and Silvia Federici allows us to locate the emergence of what we now call social reproduction theory from second wave feminism.

Key Texts/Readings

• Karl Marx: ‘The Commodity and Money’ in Marx, K 2024 [1867], Capital: Critique of Political Economy (Vol. I) trans. Paul Reitter, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
• Hannah Arendt: ‘Labour’ (from Section 12 ‘The Labour of our Body and the Work of Our Hands to Section 14 ‘Labour and Fertility’) in Arendt, H 1988 The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
• Juliet Mitchell: ‘The Politics of Women’s Liberation: 2’ in Mitchel, J 1977, Women’s Estate, Penguin. England.
• Silvia Federici: ‘Counterplanning from the Kitchen’ in Federici, S 2012, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, PM Press; Autonomedia, Oakland; Brooklyn.

Week 2 – The Nuclear Family and Capitalism 

The most “natural” site of reproductive labour is the nuclear family. The family as a social institution and familism as ideology continue to support and stabilise capitalist societies: the family is ground zero for the reification of a patriarchal gender order and a capitalist mode of production. This week we consider the function of the family in reproducing capitalist subjects and thus capitalist social relations: this in turn necessitates engaging with what queer theorist Lee Edelman termed “reproductive futurism” via the figure of the child. While ultimately Edelman’s rejection of the dialectic limits the political usefulness of his critique, it is nonetheless vital to interrogate the ideological work done by “the child”— in Week 5 we will explore more recent accounts of childhood that offer a more promising grounds for radical politics. This week we also read a crucial section of Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which despite its limitations prepared the ground for what is now known as social reproduction theory. 

Key Texts/Readings:

• Michèle Barrett & Mary McIntosh: ‘A Question of Values’ in Barrett, M & McIntosh, M 2015, The Anti-Social Family, Verso, London; New York.
• Helen Hester & Nick Srnicek: ‘Families’ in Hester, H & Srnicek, N, 2023, After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time, Verso, London.
• Shulamith Firestone: ‘Down With Childhood’ in Firestone, S 2015, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Verso, London.
• Lee Edelman: ‘The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification and the Death Drive’ in Narrative (1998), vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 18-30.
• Friedrich Engels: extract from ‘The Family’ in Engels, F 2010, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Penguin, London.

Week 3 – Social Reproduction Theory: A First Wave?

Silvia Federici was a pivotal figure in the Wages for Housework movement, which is retrospectively acknowledged by many thinkers – although not by Federici – as the “first wave” of social reproduction theory. Her claim that “capitalism requires unwaged reproductive labour in order to contain the cost of labour power” was theoretically innovative, allowing us to conceive and contest the “separate spheres” model of (waged and masculinised) productive labour and (unwaged and feminised) reproductive labour. This week we discuss texts by Federici and Alessandra Mezzadri that articulate a “first wave” position, in addition to an overview of its tendencies: an insistence that reproductive labour produces value for capital unites these thinkers.

This week we also encounter Lise Vogel’s pioneering work, which exemplifies the first wave’s expansion of Marxism via a materialist analysis of historically invisiblised and feminised reproductive labour processes. 

Key Texts/Readings:

• Silvia Federici: ‘The Reproduction of Labour Power in the Global Economy’ in Federici, S 2012, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Autonomedia, Oakland.
• Silvia Federici: ‘Social Reproduction Theory', in Radical Philosophy (2019), vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 55-7.
• Alessandra Mezzadri: ‘On the Value of Social Reproduction’ in Radical Philosophy (2019), vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 33-41.
• Barbara Laslett & Johanna Brenner: ‘Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives' in Annual Review of Sociology (1989), vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 381-404.
• Lise Vogel: ‘The Reproduction of Labour Power’ in Vogel, L 2013, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL.

Week 4 – Social Reproduction Theory: A Second Wave?

The Wages for Housework movement was theoretically ground-breaking, yet as Angela Davis noted at the time, “women of colour…have been receiving wages for housework for untold decades”. A relatively recent revival of social reproduction theory, often taking inspiration from Vogel, has contested the analytical priority that the first wave ascribed to domestic labour and housework, although in positing two waves of social reproduction theory, genealogy is less important than the question of what exactly constitutes “social reproduction”. 

This week we explore several texts that grapple with this question, expanding the terrain mapped out by the thinkers we encountered last week. Maintaining that reproductive labour does not produce value for capital, the “second wave” are more likely to differentiate carework from domestic labour and housework. Similar to last week, we will discuss texts that define the second wave and a summary of its tendencies: Vogel’s prescient chapter “Beyond Domestic Labour” is particularly useful, as it is here that we can observe a second wave theorisation of reproductive labour emerging from first wave propositions.

Key Texts/Readings:

• Angela Davis: ‘The Approaching Obsolesce of Housework’ in Davis, A 2019, Women, Race and Class, Penguin Books, London.
• Susan Ferguson: ‘Renewing Social Reproduction Feminism’ in Ferguson, S 2020, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction, Pluto Press, London.
• Paula Varela: ‘Social Reproduction in Dispute: A Debate Between Autonomists and Marxists’ in Spectre: A Marxist Journal (2021), <https://spectrejournal.com/social-reproduction-in-dispute/>.
• Nancy Fraser: ‘Contradictions of Capital and Care’ in New Left Review, vol. 100, no. 99, pp. 100-116.
• Lise Vogel: ‘Beyond Domestic Labour’ in Vogel, L 2013, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory, Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL.

Week 5 – Family Abolition, Capacious Care and Child Liberation: Social Reproduction Today

We conclude by examining a number of contemporary currents in social reproduction theory. Whether family abolitionist, child liberationist or centred on carework as a site of resistance to capital, advancing and radicalising the theory and practice of reproductive labour unites these projects. We will explore key tenets of family abolitionism and consider the question of children’s agency, as well as how the ideological work performed by “the child” might be dialectically negated to bolster emancipatory projects. Contra Edelman, an “explicitly anti-utopian logic” undermines solidarity with children: imagining the future in our present demands a radical negation that is grounded in what The Care Collective call capacious care. Caring labour is not inherently structured by the commodity form—it therefore contains a non-commodifiable kernel whose ontological possibilities demand investigation.

We find an unabashed utopianism throughout all the texts we encounter this week. However partial or polemical, this utopianism remains essential to imagining new horizons for subjectification, for human being; just as family abolition, capacious care and child liberation offer promising avenues for social reproduction theory’s future development.

Key Texts/Readings:

• The Care Collective, 2020, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence, Verso, London.
• Sophie Lewis: ‘Comrades Against Kinship’ and ‘But I Love My Family’ in Lewis, S 2022, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, Verso Books, London.
• M.E O’Brien: ‘Communist Social Reproduction’ and ‘Conclusion’ in O’Brien, ME 2022, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, Pluto Press, London.
• Madeline Lane-McKinely: ‘Child Liberation: A Utopian Problem’ in Lane-McKinely, M, 2025, Solidarity With Children, Haymarket Books, Chicago.

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No Centre; No Margins — Madness, Media, Myth and Mysticism in the Information Age

Lecturer: Kalenga Leon Kalumba

Course Schedule

Week 1 — Media as Environment: Introducing McLuhan 

• Introduce McLuhan’s core ideas: “the medium is the message,” “hot and cool media,” and the transformation of sensory ratios. 
• Understand media as environments rather than tools. 
• Examine the shift from print to electronic media. 
• Media as Extensions 
• Global Village 

Key Readings 

Marshall McLuhan

• Understanding Media, ch. 1 (“The Medium is the Message”) 
• The Gutenberg Galaxy (selected passages) 
• Interview: “The World is a Global Village” 

Week 2 — Myth, Archetype, and the Electric Age 

• Explore McLuhan’s relationship to myth, religion, and tribalism. 
• Understand how the electric age reactivates pre-modern modes of perception.
• Acoustic versus Visual space 
• Pierre Teilhard De Chardin and the Omega Point. 
• Introduce the idea of psychedelic structures in media (precursor to Davis). 

Key Readings 

McLuhan 

• Understanding Media, chs. on “radio,” “television,” and “electric light” 
• The Medium and the Light (selections on religion & media) 

Secondary Reading 

• Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (chapters on McLuhan’s mysticism) 

Week 3 — Erik Davis & Achille Mbembe: Techgnosis & the Occult Imagination 

• Introduce Erik Davis as a cultural critic and historian of techno-mysticism. 
• Understand Techgnosis as a bridge between religion, psychedelia, and cybernetics.
• Explore Davis's framing of technology as a spiritual narrative. 
• Achille Mbembe’s Idea of the return to animism. 

Key Readings 

Erik Davis & Achille Mbembe 

• Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Introduction; chs. 1–3)
• “The Psychedelic Future of the Internet” (essay) 
• Achille Mbembe, Brutalism

Week 4 — Bridging McLuhan & Davis: The Electric Mysticism of Media 

• Compare McLuhan’s Christian humanism to Davis’s psychedelic spiritual pluralism.
• Explore notions of extension, disembodiment, myth, and feedback loops.
• Connect media theory to spiritual experience and altered states. 

Key Readings 

McLuhan + Davis synthesis 

• McLuhan, Understanding Media, ch. “Automation” 
• Davis, Techgnosis, chs. on cybernetics, virtual reality, and digital mysticism 
• Davis interview: “Machine Dreams & Strange Loops” 

Week 5 — The Future: AI, Simulation, and the Posthuman Psyche AI, Streaming, VR, simulation, digital identity, and techno-spiritual futures 

• Apply McLuhan and Davis to current phenomena (AI, VR, algorithms, platform culture).
• Investigate posthuman identity, digital spirituality, and cybernetic ritual. 
• Post Literate Post historical and Post Political society 
• Explore whether AI generates new metaphysical structures. 

Key Readings 

Erik Davis 

• High Weirdness (selections) 
• Recent essays on AI, psychedelics, and digital culture 

Optional McLuhan Connections 

• Understanding Media

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Introduction to a Philosophy of Responsibility

Lecturer: John Lechte

The aim of this course is to investigate the concept of responsibility as inspired by Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy. For Levinas, responsibility is prior to freedom, prior to the ego-subject, prior to essence. As the philosopher says: ‘Responsibility for another is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence in it’ (OTB: 114). Moreover: ‘The word I means here I am, answering for everything and for everyone’ (114). The question to by pursued in light of these statements is: How have we arrived at the point where responsibility is prior to freedom of the will and is the cornerstone of ‘ethics as first philosophy’? The following lectures endeavour to answer this question. They will cover existing definitions and understandings of responsibility the better to reveal the difference with Levinas.  

One key point of comparison will be a study of Greek tragedy and responsibility

Course Schedule

Lecture One 

An appreciation of the significance of Levinas’s notion of responsibility can be gained by surveying existing approaches to the topic. Thus, the first lecture will offer a brief literature review. 

Reading

• Caruso, Gregg D. and Pereboom, Derk (2022) Moral Responsibility Reconsidered, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  
• Jonas, Hans (1973) ‘Technology and Responsibility: Reflections on the New Tasks of Ethics’, Social Research , 40 (1), 31-54.  
• Jonas, Hans (1984), The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an ethics for the Technological Age, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 130-135 (on the parent-child relation as the architype of responsibility).
• Lucas, J. R. (1995). Responsibility. Clarendon Press, Oxford, Chaps 1-4.
• Martin, David (2007) ‘Responsibility: A Philosophical Perspective’, 21-42. In Dewsbury, Guy; Dobson, John, eds, Responsibility and Dependable Systems, London: Springer.

Lecture Two

This lecture examines Greek tragedy and responsibility.  The lecture will show that the notion of the self as interiority is foreign to Greek tragedy. Indeed, the very notion of tragedy presupposes the impossibility of a self that can control circumstances. In a reading of Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone (The Theban Plays), the lecture will highlight the difficulty of imposing a modern notion of individuality onto Greek tragedy. 

Reading

• Vernant, Jean-Pierre (1978) ‘Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex’, trans. Page duBois, New Literary History, 9 (3), 475-501. 
• Mantzanas, Michail (2020) ‘The Concept of Moral Conscience in Ancient Greek Philosophy’, Conatus 5 (2), 65-86. 
• Kane, Robert L. (1975) ‘Prophecy and Perception in the Oedipus Rex’, Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-2014), 105, 189-208.
• Hall, Robert (1993) ‘Hamartia and Heroic Nobility in Oedipus Rex’, Philosophy and Literature, 17 (2), 286-294. 
• McDonald, David (1979) ‘The Trace of Absence: A Derridean Analysis of "Oedipus Rex"
  Theatre Journal, 31 (2), 147-161. 
• Strauss, Jonathan (2013) Private Lives and Public Deaths: Antigone and the Invention of Individuality, New York: Fordham University Press, 1-48.
• Lacan, Jacques (1992) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychanalysis 1959-1960, trans. Denis Porter, New York: Norton, 243-290: Pt. IV. The essence of tragedy: a commentary on Sophocles's Antigone -- 19. The splendor of Antigone -- 20. The articulations of the play -- 21. Antigone between two deaths.
• Charen, Hannes (2011) ‘Hegel Reading Antigone’, Monatshefte, 103(4), 504-516.

Lecture Three

The influence on the notion of responsibility of the Cartesian cogito will be examined. With Augustine in Charles Taylor’s reading, but more definitively with Descartes, interiority becomes the basis of certainty, the first certainty being self-certainty. Consequently, it can be argued that a text like Wittgenstein’s On Certainty in fact relies on self-certainty as its first principle.  The lecture will discuss this along with the notion of certainty in other thinkers and contexts. The implication is that self-certainty is prior to all human deliberations, a position that Levinas’s philosophy contests, as we shall see in lecture 5. The lecture will offer a reading, with regard to responsibility, of relevant sections of Taylor’s Sources of the Self.

Reading 

• Descartes, René (2022) Discourse on Method, Part IV. At: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59/59-h/59-h.htm
• Taylor, Charles (2001) Sources of the Self:The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harverd University Press, 25-54, 127-158, 185-198.
• Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1975) On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscomb, Muldon, MA: Blackwell Publishing, paras 1-174.
• Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 273-289 (on Cartesian doubt).

Lecture Four

On Hannah Arendt’s distinction between guilt and responsibility. 

Reading

• Arendt, Hannah (1977 [1963]) Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 296-298.
• Arendt, Hannah (2003) Responsibility and Judgment, New York: Schocken Books, 17-158.
• Arendt, Hannah (1994) ‘Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility’, 121–32. In J. Kohn (ed.) Essays in Understanding, London: Harcourt Brace.
• Arendt, Hannah (n.d.) ‘Moral Responsibility Under Totalitarian Dictatorships’, ms.  [Edited by Adriano Correia. The original manuscript can be found in the Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress, Box 76 (https://www.loc.gov/item/mss1105601266/)]. Copy to be made available 
• Alweiss, Lilian (2003) ‘Collective Guilt and Responsibility Some Reflections’, European Journal of Political Theory, 2(3) 307–318. 
• Greenspan, P.S. (1992) ‘Subjective Guilt and Responsibility’ Mind, 101 (402) 287-303.

Lecture Five

This lecture will engage with the relation to responsibility of the notions of transcendence and immanence as found in Levinas’s philosophy. The argument will be that the immanentist approach to responsibility is inadequate. It will be maintained that Levinas’s philosophy gives inspiration to a transcendent approach to responsibility, and that this runs counter to all approaches to certainty (the first certainty being certainty of self) derived from the Cartesian cogito as this is related to doubt and certainty. 

To get at the real significance of responsibility, it is necessary to understand the notion of infinity. And this we will do. Also, it will be shown that it is important to know what Levinas understands by ‘immanence’ compared with transcendence.

Reading

• Levinas, Emmanuel (1998) Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 114-115, 124-25, 146-47, 198.
• Levinas, Emmanuel (1999) Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith, London: The Athlone Press, 24-30, 32-33. 35-37.
• Levinas, Emmanuel (2012) Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press. Reprinted, 48-52, 84, 86-87; 92-93, 244-45.
• Levinas, Emmanuel (1989) ‘God and Philosophy’, trans. Richard A. Cohen and Alphonso Lingis. In Seán Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader, 167-189, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. 
• Waldenfels, Bernhard (1995) ‘Response and Responsibility in Levinas’, 39-52. In Peperzak, Adriaan, ed., Ethics as first Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion, New York: Routledge. 

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The World Turned Geometrical: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Descartes

Lecturer: Jon Rubin

“I beg you to send me the names of the authors who have written textbooks of philosophy, and to tell me which are the most commonly used, and whether they have any new ones since twenty years ago.” Descartes to Mersenne, 30th September 1640

This course will be an introduction to the philosophy of Descartes that situates him within his philosophical and scientific context. If you want to know what a philosopher thinks, you need to read their primary works; if you want to know, as Descartes did: what they thought they were arguing against and the ideas they took to be commonsensically true, the problems that were central, and those that were peripheral, you need to read the textbooks in use at the time.

I will attempt a double estrangement from our twenty-first century commonplaces: firstly, an explanation and description of the philosophical and scientific world view that Descartes was embroiled in – some of which he sought to overthrow and other parts, parts that we now would consider very strange, he thought so obviously right, as to not be worth debating. We can call this world view “Aristotelian” but it is the Aristotle of the textbooks used in schools and universities.

After having become convinced and committed Aristotelians, the second estrangement is that of Descartes’ work itself. Rather than structure the course around a key text, it will focus on four key ideas and themes: being, moving, thinking, and willing. These ideas do cover the classic Cartesian split between mind and body, but they help to see just why Descartes thought the world could so easily be split in this way. We will see the ways in which he helped to dismantle the world of living, organic bodies and replace it with bodies that were no more than shapes and motions. But also we will see the way in which the complex faculty psychology of the Schools was broken down into two fundamental operations: perceiving and willing.

Core Key texts for the whole course:

Primary texts:

• Descartes, René. 1984a. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press.
• Descartes, René. 1984b. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Vol. 2. Cambridge University Press.
• Descartes, René. 1991. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. Vol. 3. Cambridge University Press. Copac.

Secondary texts:

• Ariew, Roger. 2011. Descartes among the Scholastics. History of Science and Medicine Library 20. Brill.
• Broughton, Janet, and John Peter Carriero, eds. 2008. A Companion to Descartes. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy 38. Blackwell Publishing.
• Pasnau, Robert. 2011. Metaphysical Themes, 1274-1671. Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press.
• Schmaltz, Tad M. 2020. The Metaphysics of the Material World: Suárez, Descartes, Spinoza. Oxford University Press.

 Course Schedule

Week 1) The World: “Aristotle” (i.e. Suarez & the textbook tradition) on Being, Thinking, Moving, Willing.

This week will lay out the “Aristotelian” world view that Descartes inhabited. It will focus on four key problems that arise in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Physics, but from the point of view of the discussions amongst Descartes’ contemporaries and teachers. These problems are: what are the most general ways of describing the world: the problem of the categories. What is the structure of the thinking subject: the problem of faculty psychology and substantial forms. What are the best ways of describing the physical world: The problem of the four causes and just what is a body? Finally, willing: how do these debates interact with Christian concerns around divine judgement and the immortality of the soul.

Key texts:

• Adriaenssen, Han Thomas. 2019. ‘Common Conceptions and the Metaphysics of Material Substance: Domingo de Soto, Kenelm Digby and Johannes de Rae’. Journal of Early Modern Studies 8 (1): 117–39.
• Des Chene, Dennis. 2008. ‘Aristotelian Natural Philosophy:  Body, Cause, Nature’. In A Companion to Descartes, edited by Janet Broughton and John Peter Carriero. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy 38. Blackwell Publishing.

Week 2) Descartes on Being: quantity and quality, extension and thought (formal, objective, degrees of reality).

This week will address a series of questions: why did Descartes think that the world could be split between thought and extension? What that split entailed and meant. Finally, what is meant by the puzzling phrase: “degrees of reality”?

Key text:

• Descartes, René. 1984. ‘Third Meditation’. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press.

Week 3) Descartes on thinking as perceiving. How can you perceive a shape without colour or a sound without pitch?

What does it mean to think? How should we understand the argument of the “cogito, sum”? Additionally, with all secondary qualities banished from the corporeal world, how does perception still work? How can bodies which only have primary qualities (size, shape, position, speed) without the secondary qualities like: colour, smell, temperature, etc. give rise, in the thinking thing, to these phenomenal sensations?

Key texts:

• Descartes, René. 1984. ‘The World or Treatise on Light’. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1. Cambridge University Press.
• MacIntosh, J. J. 1983. ‘Perception and Imagination in Descartes, Boyle and Hooke’. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 13 (3): 327–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.1983.10715841.
• Waldow, Anik. 2020. ‘Descartes, Malebranche, and the Crisis of Perception, by Walter Ott’. Mind 129 (514): 673–81. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzz039.

Week 4) Descartes on moving: change, physics, vortices, a world without ends/final causes.

The Ancient Greek word αἴτῐον ‘aítĭon’ meant both cause and explanation. This means that the Aristotelian model of the ‘four causes’ (material, formal, efficient, final) was simultaneously a model of the four different parts of what made a complete, or whole, explanation. With the abandonment of all forms of causation, except the efficient, how did Descartes aim to explain the physical world? Can you give a complete explanation of physical and biological systems without recourse to the formal or final causes?

Key texts:

• Descartes, René. 1984. ‘Principles of Philosophy’. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1. Cambridge University Press.
• Friedman, Michael. 2008. ‘Descartes and Galileo: Copernicanism and the Metaphysical Foundations of Physics’. In A Companion to Descartes, edited by Janet Broughton and John Peter Carriero. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy 38. Blackwell Publishing.

Week 5) Descartes on thinking as willing: God, judgement, and the immortality of the soul.

It should not be overlooked that the subtitle to Descartes’ Meditations was: “in which are demonstrated the existence of God and the immortality of the soul”. Why did the existence of God need to be proved and how did Descartes go about it? Equally importantly, why, if a soul is posited, would it not automatically be immortal? What was the problem of a mortal soul, that Descartes felt he had to combat? 

Key texts:

• Adler, Jacob. 2014. ‘Mortality of the Soul from Alexander of Aphrodisias to Spinoza’. In Spinoza and Medieval Jewish Philosophy, edited by Steven Nadler. Cambridge University Press.
• Curley, Edwin M. 2001. ‘The Immortality of the Soul in Descartes and Spinoza’. Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 75: 27–41. https://doi.org/10.5840/acpaproc2001758.

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“This age is dishonored” - Reading Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International for today

Lecturer: Carolyn D'Cruz

Specters of Marx was written after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. As liberal thinkers were proclaiming the collapse of communism, the death of Marxism, and the supposed triumph of democracy, Jacques Derrida was called to address the multidisciplinary conference, “Whither Marxism? Global Crises in International Perspective”. Derrida’s lecture became the book that this course will cover in its entirety. Reading will be supplemented through excerpts from Marxist texts that Derrida engages with to formulate a ‘spectro-poetics’ and hauntological response to Marx’s imperative to change the world. Our reading takes place at a time when the liberal public sphere is decrying the decay of democracy against the palpable rise of fascism. Returning to this text’s reflection that ‘the time is out of joint’ (Hamlet), we will reckon with the ghosts surrounding what Derrida calls a ‘democracy to come’ in the context of today. Marx’s ghosts join fellow phantoms as they battle over the mutual constitution of democracy, communism, socialism, fascism and anarchism in national and international affairs. Specters will prompt us to reckon with this political heritage and the state of international resistance to oppression.

Course Schedule

Seminar One: Appetisers and borders: the text and work of Specters

Reading Derrida is not easy, so the first seminar will focus on strategies for engaging with this book. We’ll launch discussion with Derrida's notoriously misunderstood phrase, il n’y a pas de hors texte (there is no outside text). This will guide us through questioning conventional divisions between the inside and outside of a text, which in turn will inform our reading of the Marxist opposition between ideality and materiality.  Less cited, but as important, Derrida uses the term hors d’oeuvre (outside of work) in relation to the Greek word, parergon – a concept used to discuss the frame or outside to a work of art. As many have noticed, hors d’oeuvres also refers to the appetisers one may have outside the main course of the meal. In preparation for the main text, we will draw from these phrases to read only the front matter of Specters for the first seminar.

Reading

• Editor’s introduction, note on the text, dedication, exordium, epigraph, Specters of Marx, pp: vii-xx, p. 1.

Seminar Two: Chapter One, Injunctions of Marx  

Derrida does not begin in the disciplinary domain of either politics or philosophy to approach Marx, but literature. Framing his discussion with an epitaph and quotation from Shakespeare’s Hamlet—the time is out of joint—we re-read Marx through a reflection on ‘a disjointed or disadjusted now’. We'll reflect on dis-jointure as a ‘de-totalizing condition of justice’. The figure of the ghost, or spectre, speaks to the opening of The Mainfesto of the Communist Party where Marx and Engels announce that ‘A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism’. Derrida tracks Marx’s own battles with making the specter present, by following Blanchot’s identification of three voices within Marx as the ontological, political and scientific. Through reckoning with the heritage of these voices in the dis-adjusted time and place of the present, we are also asked to think about relations between theory and practice as necessarily discontinuous, heterogeneous and unable to be gathered into a unified ‘actual reality’. We’ll ask how this affects ‘doing politics’.

Reading

• Chapter One, Injunctions of Marx, pp.  3-48
• K Marx and F Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

Seminar Three: Chapter two, Conjuring Marxism - & Chapter three, Wears and Tears. 

What happens in Marx’s name in space/time, and what sort of injunction is pledged by those who affirm or reject his works and calls for action? We'll follow Derrida's meditation on Marx’s Thesis XI— “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”—to wrestle with the relationship between political position-taking and the idea of ‘an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets’ (p. 51). As we examine the status of Marxism in public discourse, repeated in the apparatuses of political parties and politicians, media and information dissemination, and academic scholarship, we’ll use the idea of hegemony to assess how a reinvigorated critique of relations between capitalism and liberal democracy emerges. Signalling that the concepts of the State, nation-state and international law will be put to the test as we diagnose Marx’s injunctions today, Derrida lists ‘the blackboard picture ‘of ‘ten plagues’ that indicate the wears and tears of a bleak world that is still going badly. Action and critique will have to find its way between the impossible poles of the empirical world of facts and ideal world of abstraction.

Reading

• Chapter Two, Conjuring—Marxism, pp. 49-76 
• Chapter Three, Wears and Tears (tableau of an ageless world), pp. 77-94.

Seminar 4: Chapter four, In the name of revolution, the double barricade (impure “impure impure history of ghosts”) 

The title of this chapter alone gives us a lot to think. For Derrida, reckoning with Marx cannot be separated from a certain trauma and work of mourning over what occurs in his name and in the name of revolution. The emancipatory promise that calls communism to present itself and end its spectral status is tied to an historical mess where distinguishing between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces on the ground loses assurance. The battle between specters for the spirit of Marx and communism is therefore one that will always risk the worst, where emancipation can turn to an opposing totalitarian form. The specter of totalitarianism that communism’s name has become entangled with in the West has been mostly studied in relation to nation states, though Derrida stresses that the Marxist communist project is an internationalist injunction. To concretise some of the themes that Derrida raises about Marx’s own battles with materiality of being and ideality of consciousness in revolutionary projects, we'll take a detour through engaging with the concepts of self-determination, national consciousness, and settler colonialism both ‘here’ and ‘abroad’.

Reading

• Chapter Four - In the name of revolution, the double barricade (impure “impure impure history of ghosts”), pp. 95-124
• Marx, selected passages from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Seminar five: Chapter 5, Apparition of the inapparent - the phenomenological “conjuring trick”

Through reading passages from Marx’s German Ideology and Capital, Derrida reflects on the contradictions the former runs into when trying to maintain pure division between the oppositional poles of the material and ideal, use value and exchange value, science and ideology. When oppositional logic runs into an aporia, deconstructive work takes off through another type of logic. Having to distinguish several specters of Marx from the spirit he affirms as a pledge for justice, Derrida offers the logic of hauntology, which he uses alongside the term spectrality, from which to proceed toward an ethico-political analysis of the world’s ‘plagues’ and call for action. If the exordium prepared us for reckoning with ghosts, the concluding chapter pushes us to attend to the work of inheritance and promise for justice as a hauntological project for a ‘democracy to come’. 

Reading

• Chapter Five – Apparition of the inapparent – the phenomenological “conjuring trick”, pp. 125-176

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Critical Theory in the Age of Recognition

Lecturer: Melvin Kivinen

How has it come to be that the dominant grammar of critical social philosophy has taken the form of what has come to be taken as “recognition theory”? If popular social struggles are today couched in terms of recognition, ought these theoretical developments be taken as a source of optimism for re-establishing the project of critical theory, if what distinguishes critical theory from traditional theory is its grounding in social movements? It is at this juncture when progress waged at the cultural level has run aground, and theory and practice risk de-tethering, that we are in a position to re-evaluate the trajectory of the critical theory tradition from its origins with the likes of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, through the intersubjective turn of Jürgen Habermas, and the recognitive turn waged above all by Axel Honneth. Can the aims of a critical theory of the current day be said to be the same as those of the early part of the last century? Do the resources of a contemporary critical theory, grounded in the framework of an ethics of recognition, make good on these aims where its early practitioners were unable to? What does a critical theory of recognition still have to learn from its Urgesichte? 

Course Schedule

Week 1: What is critical theory? 

Reading: 

• Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory”, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, pp. 188-243. 

Further reading: 

• J.M. Bernstein, “The Idea of Instrumental Reason”, The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School, pp. 3-18. 
• Herbert Marcuse, “Philosophy and Critical Theory”, Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, pp. 58-74. 
• Yvonne Sherratt, “Adorno's Concept of the Self: A Marriage of Freud and Hegelian Marxism”, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 58 (227), pp. 101-117. 

This first week looks to establish what “critical theory” actually is, and how critical theory differs from “traditional theory”. This requires a genealogical account of the concept in its historical context, and asking why a form of critical social philosophy arose which was critical of capitalist modernity and the Marxist responses which sought to grapple with this reality, with a particular shift to considerations of cultural production and subjective formation with insights from psychoanalysis and sociology, and the effects of exchange and instrumental reason in everyday life. 

Week 2: What was the intersubjective turn? 

Reading: 

• Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article”, Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, pp. 136-142. 
• Jürgen Habermas, “Introduction” by Maeve Cooke, On the Pragmatics of Communication, pp. 1-19. 

Further reading: 

• Joel Whitebook, “Intersubjectivity and the Monadic Core of the Psyche: Habermas and Castoriadis on the Unconscious”, Revue européenne des sciences sociales, 86, pp. 225-244.
• Joel Whitebook, “Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory”, The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School, pp. 32-47. 
• Raymond Geuss, “Introduction”, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School. 

From establishing the principal aims of a critical theory, we are thus able to situate the “intersubjective turn” in critical theory. Where the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists found themselves at certain impasses, expressed in the form of pessimism or utopianism, in the post-War period, Habermas offered an alternative vision of theory which borrowed from pragmatic theories of communication in order to renew critical theory. 

Week 3: What is recognition theory? 

Reading: 

• Timo Jütten, “The Theory of Recognition in the Frankfurt School”, The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School, pp. 82-94. 
• Axel Honneth, “Translator’s Introduction” from Joel Anderson, and “Introduction”, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. 
• Jean-Philippe Deranty, “Beyond the linguistication of critical social theory”, Beyond Communication, pp. 109-117. 

Further reading: 

• Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser, “Introduction: Redistribution or Recognition?”, Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange, pp. 1-5.
• Robert Pippin, “What is the Question for which Hegel’s theory of Recognition is the Answer?”, European Journal of Philosophy, 8 (2), pp. 155-172. 

Where Habermasian intersubjective theory found itself at its own impasses, obscuring critical elements of modern life, Honneth sought to offer a renewed basis for critical theory which goes beyond the communicative. Recognition theory likewise must be historically situated in the time of the “new social movements” and concerns for “multiculturalism” amidst the demise of traditional forms of political practice oriented around class and national liberation, and as a descriptive and normative framework for comprehending modernity. 

Week 4: Deficits of recognition: language, nature, body, the subject, capital 

Reading: 

• Emmanuel Renault and Jean-Philippe Deranty, “Politicising Honneth’s Ethics of Recognition”, Thesis Eleven, 88, pp. 92-111.

Further reading: 

• Miriam Bankovsky and Alice Le Goff, “Deepening critical theory: French contributions to theories of recognition”, Recognition theory and contemporary French moral and political philosophy: Reopening the dialogue, pp. 1-22. 
• Jean-Philippe Deranty, “The Loss of Nature in Axel Honneth's Social Philosophy. Rereading Mead with Merleau-Ponty”, Critical Horizons, 6, pp. 153-181. 
• Joel Whitebook, “The Urgeschichte of Subjectivity Reconsidered”, New German Critique, 81, pp. 125-141. 

The recognition theoretical framework provides numerous advances in understanding the modern condition of individuals and social collectives. Yet, at the same time, recognition theory comes to introduce its own blindspots. It is here that we can consider whether recognition theory is capable of incorporating insights from other theoretical traditions, and how recognition theory can speak to the most pressing contemporary crises. 

Week 5: What to make of recognition? 

Reading: 

• Judith Butler, “Giving an Account of Oneself” Diacritics, 31 (4), pp. 22-40.
• Vladimir Safatle, “Towards an anti-predicative concept of recognition”, Grant Hotel Abyss: Desire, Recognition and the Restoration of the Subject, pp. 271-299. 

Further reading: 

• Axel Honneth, “Reification and Recognition: A New Look at an Old Idea”, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (The Berkeley Tanner Lectures), pp. 17-94. 
• Foster, Roger, “An Adornian Theory of Recognition? A Critical Response to Axel Honneth’s Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea”, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 19 (2), pp. 255-265. 

From this vantage point, we are situated to be able to reflect on the fate of the concept of recognition as it has been received, and ask whether there is room for further scope in expanding the recognition framework to other areas of individual and social life. In particular, we can do so by returning to the original aims of critical theory as first formulated in the first generation of the Frankfurt School, and ask how these aims have been advanced, whether they have shifted, and/or whether they require further shifting.