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Fall 2022
Communication Breakdown: Media, Technology, Subjectivity
The goal of the course is to address three groups of questions, which will structure the three main periods of the term:
A) General Theory of Communication. Philosophically, what does it mean to communicate? Is it a mere (daily, ordinary) transmission of information, or some rare form of experience? Do we nowadays communicate too much, too frequently (on TikTok, WhatsApp, etc.), or not enough because we miss some possibilities of intense, singular, “authentic” forms of communication that would shape a real common relation to the world?
B) Wandering Avatars of the Digital Realm. More specifically, do social media, contemporary technology, artificial intelligence, algorithmic regimes, facilitate or hinder communication? Do these technologies of communication, machines and on-line communities, forge a shared relation to the world or rather fragment the world in self-enclosed micro-realms? What is the essence of digital communication, its unconscious foundations, and its (un)expected effects on the psychology of persons and collectives?
C) Non-Communication, Para-Communication. Many of the dominant kinds of communication are ultimately preemptive (i.e. reducing the possibilities of individual and collective experiences of singularization). Does this mean that we need political strategies able to interrupt and radically reorient communication? What would be the language, the aesthetics of politics of non-communication (breaking with social medias and official forms of communication) and para-communication (inventing new uses of technologies)? If we want to avoid the self-enclosures of micro-realms inhabited by the fragmented avatars of individuals, is it time to rethink our modes of communication with the other-than-humans, be they animals, machines, or aliens?
The questions we follow across these three sections will shed light on what communication is and also on what escapes communication or is incommunicable. To explore this (non)relation between communication and the incommunicable, we will read philosophers, theorists, scientists, and poets: Gilles Deleuze, Édouard Glissant, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Timnit Gebru, Kate Crawford, Antoinette Rouvroy, Lydia H. Liu, Andrew Culp, Felix Stalder, Legacy Russell, Christian Fuchs, Jean Baudrillard, Georges Bataille, Marshall McLuhan, David Bates, Margaret A. Boden, Florence Raulin-Cerceau, Etel Adnan, and John Durham Peters. We will study several films (Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival) and we will also investigate how musicians communicate during improvised jazz sessions.
Fall 2021
The Subject: Below and Beyond
The seminar is devoted to the question of the subject and subjectivity in the era of social networks, rampant fascism, and ecological collapse. What is a subject? If we follow Augustine and Rousseau, being a subject implies a form of self-reflexivity and interiority. In this class, we will question the “self” of self-reflexivity and we will strive to fathom the interiority of the subject. We will examine different approaches to the subject: theorizations of the subject in terms of constructions and performances, as well as those that understand subjectivation as an experience and as an effect of an “event.” We will also explore non-human forms of subjectivity in order to consider the category of subjectivity beyond the human.
One of the main theoretical stakes of this class will be to see how it is always useful, if not necessary, to think the subject as related to that which is non-subjective (for instance the unconscious), and that which constitutes and simultaneously exceeds the subject (be it God, an event, nature, the outside, death, the terrestrial situation, the cosmological condition, etc.).
Authors to be studied (amongst others): Frantz Fanon, Friedrich Nietzsche, Saidiya Hartman, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Master Eckhardt, Sigmund Freud, Marguerite Duras, Alain Badiou, Fred Moten, Judith Butler, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Mark Fisher, Michel Foucault, Marcello Tari, Kathryn Yusoff, etc.
Spring 2020
Looking for Satellites: Mediating the Earth
In this seminar, we will analyze mediations between the Earth and the cosmos, the terrestrial and the “extra-terrestrial” level. The presence of the cosmological on Earth can be material (as our planet is made of the remains of supernovas), but also cultural and architectural (sacred places built as what Yi-Fu Tuan calls “cosmic diagrams”). Conversely, human beings put their footprint in space by launching satellites and space probes. Artificial satellites and space probes could be interpreted as mediations, encircling the Earth (from Sputnik to space stations) or other planets, and projecting terrestrial signals into the universe (from Voyager to Chinese Chang’e). However, satellites are ambiguous mediations, both useful and dangerous: they create a field of planetary observation that can also be used as an instrument of control and war, a dense mix of decommissioned, decaying, and active robotic spacecrafts “isolating the Earth from outer space” (Yukimura, Planetes). Leaning on media theory, Space archeology, anthropology, and continental philosophy, we will explore the political, aesthetical, and ontological aspects of our planetary mediations.
Fall 2019
Angel of History: Walter Benjamin and Political Messianism
My course aims at analyzing Walter Benjamin’s conception of time and space. 1/ Concerning time, Benjamin developed a messianism of the past, that is to say the idea that the past is not fixed, unalterable, but incomplete. The dreams of the past – dreams of happiness and emancipation – have still to be realized and it’s our task to realize them: it’s the task of those who, today, did not give up with revolutionary hopes, to realize the potentialities of the past. What Benjamin calls the “dialectical image” is the encounter between the present – a sign in the present – and the unfulfilled dreams of the past. 2/ Concerning space, Benjamin’s philosophy is an unceasing examination of the (non)relation between distance and proximity. In his famous “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin analyzes the disappearance of the “aura,” understood as the manifestation of a certain kind of distance.
Drawing out these two theoretical threads, in this seminar we will address the following: Is there a relation between the manifestation of distance and the possibility of completing the past, that is to say of realizing the emancipatory potential of the distant past in the present? What sort of aesthetics are at play in the relation between the past and distance, presence and proximity? What kind of future is thinkable in Benjamin’s philosophy?
Relating Benjamin to Hegel and Marx, we will interpret the “Angel of History” that Benjamin introduced in his famous “Thesis on History” both as a figure of revolutionary hopes and as a cosmic figure able to produce mediations between past and present, now and tomorrow, the Earth and the cosmos, politics and theology, our situations and its outsides. We will explore how Benjamin’s conception of spacetime can help us to find a way out of the Anthropocene, understood as the will to master the Earth thanks to geo-technology. “Men as a species completed their development thousands of years ago,” Benjamin wrote in the middle of the 1920’s, “but mankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology, a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families.” (“To the Planetarium”) We will consider if the “new contact with the cosmos” that Benjamin called for might give rise to a new mode of revolution.
Authors studied: Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Kristin Ross, Gershom Scholem.
Spring 2019
Alien Studies
Alien is a term that can refer either to a terrestrial being – a strange person or a foreigner – or to an extraterrestrial creature. The goal of this class is to explore this ambiguity (terrestrial or extra-terrestrial) in philosophy and political theory (F. Fanon, K. Marx, E. Levinas, J. Rancière, J. Sexton), feminist theory (Laboria Cuboniks, L. Irigaray), environmental thought (D. Abram, H.D. Thoreau), psychoanalysis (S. Freud), literature (R. Bradbury, O. E. Butler, W.E.B. Du Bois, I. Calvino, G. de Maupassant, T. Morrison), cinema (J. Akomfrah’s The Last Angel of History, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, A. Garland’s Annihilation, J. Nichols’ Midnight Special, R. Scott’s Alien, S. Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, D. Villeneuve’s Arrival) and music (N. Mitchell). If the term alien provokes questions – “Who is she?” “From which country (or from which planet) does he come from?” “Is she too different from me or too close to me?” – this class will show that to really answer these questions requires understanding that, first and foremost, aliens are us. As the poet Rimbaud famously said, “I is another,” that is to say: what is alien is that part of me that I repress, my own alterity (my unconscious for instance). However, should we reduce the alien to an inside story? Is not the alien always the object of an encounter, a surprise, be it a good or a bad one? Is not the alien the irruption of the outside? If the alien is at once intrinsic to the self and outside of the self, terrestrial and extraterrestrial, perhaps conceptualizing the alien requires going beyond the logic of “either or.”
Fall 2018
Space is The Place: From Copernicus to Elon Musk (CL 500)
This class is an inquiry into our relation with outer space. What philosophical, historical, and scientific developments gave rise to the Space Age, a period that began with Sputnik’s launch in 1957 and that was aiming to explore, and conquer, Space? Why does the famous entrepreneur Elon Musk want to “die on Mars”? More generally, why do we want to go “out there”? Is not the Earth already “out there,” already a planet amongst other planets wandering in the infinite universe? To answer these questions, the class will be divided in two parts:
1/ First, we will study the Astronomical Revolution of the 17th century. Contrary to the interpretation that states that the Copernican Revolution only had “nihilistic” effects (because the universe is infinite, human beings came to understand themselves as “lost” in it), we will see that the Copernican Revolution cast Earth as a “noble star” (to use an expression of the German thinker Nicholas of Cusa) freed from the pseudo “celestial orbs” that were supposed to fix it. We’ll read texts written by Hans Blumenberg, Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Immanuel Kant, Alexandre Koyré, Nietzsche, Pascal, and Eugene Thacker. Leaning on Lisa Messeri’s Placing Outer Space, we will also investigate the reasons for which the Earth could be considered an “exo-planet”: the more we try to find “earth-like” planets, the more our own planet seems alien;
2/ In the second part of the class, we will continue our exploration of the astronomical sphere through an investigation devoted to the Space Age and its metaphysical origins. Through the study of Russian Cosmism (Boris Groys, Anton Vidokle) and Afro-Futurism (Sun Ra, Kodwo Eshun), we will try to contemplate an alternative Space Age whose goal would not be the colonization and the exploitation of outer space but a metaphorical detour aimed at achieving the justice that has not been rendered on Earth. Leaning on literary texts (Charles Baudelaire, Alexis Pauline Gumbs), films (Space is the Place, The Last Angel of History, Gravity), and music (P-Funk, Gérard Grisey), we will shed some light on our “Icarus’ Syndrome,” that is to say the human desire to escape gravity. Is this desire just an attempt to avoid environmental, terrestrial constraints? Or is it one expression of the human power of deterritorialization, the power thanks to which human beings can escape, and fight, injustice?
What is Theory? (CL 371)
Course Description: What is theory? Why does theory scare us? And why do we urgently need theory? To investigate these questions, this class will deal with the relation of theory to metaphysics, abstraction, ideology, and critique. We will work on basic philosophical texts (Arendt, Deleuze, Derrida, Marx, Lévinas, Plato, Whitehead), contemporary theory (Alaimo, Malabou, Rancière, Spivak, Virno), psychoanalysis (Freud), literary theory (Bataille, Breton, Cixous, Morrison, Williams, Woolf) and films (Godard, Lars von Trier). We will explore the materialist dimension of theory, that is to say the necessity for theory to recognize an exteriority – praxis, nature, the unconscious, the real, the other, history, etc. – that escapes the empire of pure speculation. We will identify the uses of theory as the necessary detour without which it’s impossible to inhabit – and transform – the world.
Summer 2018
Environmental Ethics: Ethics for a Damaged Planet (Envir. Studies/Philosophy 441)
Course Description: “Anthropocene,” “Capitalocene,” “Necrocene,” “Anthrobscene,” even “Chthulucene:” new words abound to describe a global situation in which developed human societies are recognized as a major geomorphological force. But what are the ethical consequences of such power? Since Descartes, human beings have been cast as “masters” (and “possessors”) of nature. The problem, as philosopher Hans Jonas has argued, is that it’s difficult for human beings to “master their mastery,” that is to say to control their technological and industrial power. Yes, human beings have the power to do wonderful things, they can improve health, they can preserve what has to be protected, but they can also destroy biodiversity, turn climate into a global danger, and deeply damage the planet. This course focuses on key concepts in philosophy in order to consider what models of ethical responsibility might allow for the just and wise treatment of human beings, nonhuman life, the planet, and the weather. We will also consider how affect crosses with philosophy: how might the wonder and horror we feel in response to cascading environmental problems impact – in good or bad ways – efforts toward just and/or wise environmental philosophy? With thinkers Arendt, Braidotti, Callicott, Crutzen, Ghosh, Haraway, Jonas, Kant, Luciano, Malm, Lévinas, Nietzsche, Nussbaum, Sagan, Sarkar, Singer, and Turpin, we will question our responsibility vis-à-vis the Blue Marble, human beings, and non-human forms of life. Drawing on the concepts introduced during each session, we will explore films and documentaries (District 9, Ghost in the Shell 2, Grizzly Man, Leviathan, Meek’s Cutoff) to reveal their ethical – or unethical – signification.
Spring 2018
In Search of the Real: Realism and Anti-Realism (CL 350)
Back to reality! This might be the motto of several contemporary thinkers: Graham Harman’s “speculative realism” and Karen Barad’s “agential realism” strive to reinvent a more material relation to reality, things, objects, and meaning. Yet what kind of reality is shaped through these theoretical frames? Is realism the disguise of an unmentionable fiction? Through the analysis of novels and short stories (J.-K. Huysmans, H.P. Lovecraft, Georges Pérec, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain), poems (Ezra Pound, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Rosmarie Waldrop), films and documentaries (Luis Buñuel, John Carpenter, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, Francis Ford Coppola, David Lynch, the Wachowskis), literary theory and film theory (Roland Barthes, André Breton, Siegfried Kracauer, Georg Lukács, Guy de Maupassant, Raymond Williams), psychoanalysis (Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan), and other contemporary theoretical texts (Hannah Arendt, Karen Barad, Amitav Ghosh, Graham Harman), we will consider if works of art represent reality or confront the impossibility of exhausting its description.
The World According to Marx: An Introduction to Marxisms and Post-Marxisms (CL 771)
Marxism is a magnet for love and hate. This class moves below these passionate responses to explore how Marx’s philosophy can help us to understand the world we live in: a globalized world, in which the financial economy seems to reign, in which nation-states doubt their real sovereignty, in which environments suffer from the impacts of human development. From the Romantic young Marx to the mature Marx of Capital, we will explore founding Marxist texts and also those who have critiqued them. The authors studied during the term will include: L. Althusser, H. Arendt, A. Badiou, J. Baudrillard, G. Debord, A.J. Goldstein, A. Gramsci, Stuart Hall, M. Hardt and A. Negri, G. Lukács, K. Marx and F. Engels, E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, K. Ross.
Calling Planet Earth. Introduction to Environmental Humanities (CL 203)
We live on Earth, but do we know exactly what the Earth is? Is it a mere planet wandering in a cold universe? The quasi-living ecosphere some thinkers call “Gaia”? Or a sort of “spaceship” that geoengineers can enhance and pilot? Drawing on literature (J.G Ballard, J.M. Coetzee, U. Le Guin, Sun Ra, M. Shelley), cinema (Into the Wild, Koyaanisqatsi, Promised Land, When the Levees Broke, 2001: A Space Odyssey), philosophy (H. Jonas), science (P. Crutzen, L. Margulis, J. von Neumann), anthropology (T. Ingold, C. Levi-Strauss), and theorists who shaped the environmental thought (R. Carson, W. Cronon, B. Latour, A. Leopold, C. Merchant, R. Nixon, H.D. Thoreau), this class investigates the crucial issues of our terrestrial condition. If we want to address the environmental problems that humans are confronted with (climate change, loss of biodiversity, technological risks, environmental inequity), we need to change our representations of nature, humans, and technology.
Spring 2017
Hegel beyond Hegel (CL 371)
“The True is the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk”: this sentence is not the poetic effusion of an inspired writer, but a central claim of Hegel, the famously staid 19th century German philosopher. This sentence might seem surprising from the master of dialectics, a rigorous method of thought based on logic: after all, its association of truth with drunkenness and Bacchus, the god of ritual madness and religious ecstasy, would not seem to fit a model of strict logic. The goal of this course is to show that Hegel’s thought is deeply open to madness, visionary poetry, and radical political events. To establish this point, we will alternate the study of philosophers (Adorno, Benjamin, Butler, Deleuze, Jameson, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Kojève, Malabou, Marx, Žižek), poets (Silesius, Waldrop), play writers and unclassifiable essayists (Beckett, Bataille). Through these intertwined studies, we will encounter and define crucial concepts like being, nothingness, becoming, negativity, plasticity, sublation, history and its ends, idealism, materialism, struggle for recognition, and dialectics.
Weird Lit.: Humans, Cyborgs, and Animals (CL 202)
This class will focus on the singular forms of being that people literature: humans and also non-humans, a vast category including animals, insects, cyborgs, and robots. We will pay attention to the weird characters that we encounter in novels: Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote), Bartleby (Herman Melville’s “Bartleby”), a “blind but wise” old woman (Toni Morrison’s “Nobel Lecture”), and a Colonel beyond Good and Evil (Francis F. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now). We will meet a famous monster (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), neurotic superheroes (Alan Moore’s Watchmen), robots more human than humans (Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot), the prophet of the Overhuman (Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra), the frightening “horla” (Maupassant’s The Horla), a dog who cannot resist the call of the wild (London’s The Call of the Wild), and a cosmic entity concealed under the ocean (Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”). These readings will lead us to reconsider the representations we have of humans, animals, and technological beings.
Fall 2016
In Search of the Real: Literature and Realism (CL 771)
Back to reality! This might be the motto of several contemporary thinkers: Graham Harman’s “speculative realism” and Karen Barad’s “agential realism” strive to reinvent a more material relation to reality, things, objects, and meaning. Yet what kind of reality is shaped through these theoretical frames? Is realism the disguise of an unmentionable fiction? Through the analysis of novels and short stories (J.-K. Huysmans, H.P. Lovecraft, Georges Pérec, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain), poems (Ezra Pound, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Rosemarie Waldrop), films and art works (John Carpenter, Francis Ford Coppola, David Lynch, Trevor Paglen, Agnès Varda), theory-fiction (Nick Land, Reza Negarestani), literary theory (Roland Barthes, Fredric Jameson, Georg Lukács, Guy de Maupassant, Paul de Man, Raymond Williams), psychoanalysis (Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan), and other contemporary theoretical texts (Hannah Arendt, Karen Barad, Graham Harman, Jussi Parikka), we will consider if works of art represent reality or confront the impossibility of exhausting its description.
Calling Planet Earth. Introduction to Environmental Humanities (CL 203)
We live on Earth, but do we know exactly what the Earth is? Is it a mere planet wandering in a cold universe? The quasi-living ecosphere some thinkers call “Gaia”? Or a sort of “spaceship” that geoengineers can enhance and pilot? Drawing on literature (J.G Ballard, J.M. Coetzee, U. Le Guin, Sun Ra, M. Shelley), cinema (Into the Wild, Koyaanisqatsi, Promised Land, 2001: A Space Odyssey), philosophy (H. Jonas), science (P. Crutzen, L. Margulis, J. von Neumann), anthropology (T. Ingold, C. Levi-Strauss), and theorists who shaped the environmental thought (R. Carson, W. Cronon, B. Latour, A. Leopold, C. Merchant, R. Nixon, H.D. Thoreau), this class investigates the crucial issues of our terrestrial condition. If we want to address the environmental problems that humans are confronted with (climate change, loss of biodiversity, technological risks, environmental inequity), we need to change our representations of nature, humans, and technology.
Spring 2016
New Materialities: Things, Objects, and Agency
(Faculty Development Seminar: Website)
Weird Lit.: Humans, Cyborgs, and Animals (Comp. Lit. 202)
This class will focus on the singular forms of being that people literature: humans and also non-humans, a vast category including animals, insects, cyborgs, and robots. We will pay attention to the weird characters that we encounter in novels: Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote), Bartleby (Herman Melville’s “Bartleby”), a “blind but wise” old woman (Toni Morrison’s “Nobel Lecture”), and a Colonel beyond Good and Evil (Francis F. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now). We will meet a famous monster (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), neurotic superheroes (Alan Moore’s Watchmen), robots more human than humans (Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot), the prophet of the Overhuman (Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra), the frightening “horla” (Maupassant’s The Horla), a dog who cannot resist the call of the wild (London’s The Call of the Wild), and a cosmic entity concealed under the ocean (Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”). These readings will lead us to reconsider the representations we have of humans, animals, and technological beings.
Fall 2015
What is Theory? Literature and Philosophy (Complit. 371 )
What is theory? Why does theory scare us? And why do we urgently need theory? To investigate these questions, this class will deal with the relation of theory to metaphysics, abstraction, ideology, and critique. We will work on basic philosophical texts (Plato, Whitehead, Marx, Althusser, Arendt, Deleuze, Lévinas), contemporary theory (Spivak, Rancière), psychoanalysis (Freud), literary theory (Woolf, Bataille, Breton, Williams, Hall, Jameson, Morrison, Cixous, Culler) and films (Godard, Iñárritu). We will explore the materialist dimension of theory, that is to say the necessity for theory to recognize an exteriority – praxis, nature, the unconscious, the real, history, etc. – that escapes the empire of pure speculation. We will identify the uses of theory as the necessary detour without which it’s impossible to inhabit – and transform – the world.
Environmental Studies (Lecture Course – Nelson Institute)
Human beings are not only in the environment, for the environment is in them: the goal of this class is to shed some light on this surprising statement. What does it mean? Is it a joke? Definitely not: this statement describes our reality, our past and our coming daily-life. If you doubt, just think about any environmental issue: heat waves issuing from climate change (Madison summer 2012), hurricanes (Katrina 2005), etc. Whatever the problem, we discover the same reality: we are not separated from our milieu of life. What happens “outside” touches our inside very concretely.
To explore the situation of humans in our ecological era, this class will focus on cultural representations of human beings, technologies, nature, and non-humans (animals, plants) coming from cinema, literature and theory. These representations call intro question the same thing: what is the place of human beings vis-à-vis nonhuman beings? Does technology make human beings into gods, into supermen? Would human beings like to be Cyborgs? Or are human beings animals for good? In short, to think the environment as an entanglement of nature and technology is to think the puzzling question of the place of human beings.
Summer 2015
Literature of the Environment: Speaking for Nature (Envir St 307 – Nelson Institute)
The goal of this course is to think about the ways humans represent the Earth. Is the Earth an artificial and passive object that we can modify at will? Or should we consider the Earth as a quasi-living entity? 1/ First, we will shed some light on different approaches to the Anthropocene, that is to say the geological period that began when human activities became able to have a major influence on the climate and on all environments: what is the place of nature when human beings wholly transform the Earth? 2/ Then, we will focus on geoengineering (the attempt to master climate change thanks to the technological optimization of the climate). We will consider what representations of nature undergird climate engineering projects and the dangerous environmental consequences that such projects could entail; 3/The third part of the course will be devoted to space exploration and Terraforming (the process of transforming a hostile environment into one appropriate to human life) in sci-fi literature and cinema: is the fictitious notion of Terraforming a model for geoengineering?
Spring 2015
Life, Technology, and the Outside. An Investigation of New French Theory (English 795)
Is the Outside a mathematizable domain absolutely separated from human subjectivity? Or is it the condition of the possibility for the individuation of living beings? Is biocentrism a theoretical weakness? Or the requirement for thought? Does technology split life and thought? Or constitute their intimate relation? Focusing on Catherine Malabou’s, Quentin Meillassoux’s, and Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy, the course will highlight the ontology at stake in contemporary French theory. Vitalism, realism, and materialism, life and existence, the empirical and the transcendental, nature and technology, biology and mathematics, immanence and the outside, will be explored and defined during the course.
Welcome to the Apocalypse! Cinema & Ecology (English 457)
In this course we will describe the functions of cinema in an age of environmental disasters. Every session will be devoted to an eco-apocalyptic movie that we will question with a text coming from cinema studies (André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer), catastrophe theory (Jared Diamond), ecology (Paul Crutzen), ecocriticism (Frederick Buell), psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud, Slavoj Žižek), philosophy (Alain Badiou, Walter Benjamin), and literature (Ursula Le Guin). For each film (Noah, The Day after Tomorrow, Soylent Green, The Walking Dead, etc.) we will investigate if it records, distorts, or projects reality (even if these three operations can obviously be combined). Indeed, we might think that eco-apocalyptic cinema only imagines possible events: would its own goal be to distract us from the necessary coming of these events? Would it try to falsely avert, thanks to the imaginary, the real dangers that threaten us? Is eco-apocalyptic cinema just a smoke screen that covers over real ecological problems? Or is it possible to argue that cinema is able to show us what we might not be able to see without it? Fueling our fears and our paranoia, cinema sometimes enables us to think what we refuse to think: the extinction of human beings, or at least the irreversible deterioration of the living conditions of human and non-human populations. Cinema tries to deliver justice with images when we refuse to see and to act politically to avoid catastrophes.
Fall 2014
Environmental Studies (Lecture Course – Nelson Institute)
Human beings are not only in the environment, for the environment is in them: the goal of this class is to shed some light on this surprising statement. What does it mean? Is it a joke? Definitely not: this statement describes our reality, our past and our coming daily-life. If you doubt, just think about any environmental issue: heat waves issuing from climate change (Madison summer 2012), hurricanes (Katrina 2005), etc. Whatever the problem, we discover the same reality: we are not separated from our milieu of life. What happens “outside” touches our inside very concretely.
To explore the situation of humans in our ecological era, this class will focus on cultural representations of human beings, technologies, nature, and non-humans (animals, plants) coming from cinema, literature and theory. These representations call intro question the same thing: what is the place of human beings vis-à-vis nonhuman beings? Does technology make human beings into gods, into supermen? Would human beings like to be Cyborgs? Or are human beings animals for good? In short, to think the environment as an entanglement of nature and technology is to think the puzzling question of the place of human beings.
Summer 2014
Experiencing the Anthropocene (Nelson Institute)
This course has two goals. The first one is to think about the ways humans mediate (represent, assess, and symbolize) the Earth in the era of the Anthropocene. We will consider accounts of the Earth as a “living” being that can react negatively when we don’t “respect its laws.” We will also consider accounts of the Earth as a sort of sophisticated machine – a Spaceship – that we can master if we can understand its mechanisms. The second goal of the class is to give students an opportunity to speak about their own experiences of the Anthropocene. After all, the Anthropocene is not only a concept, but also a concrete change that affects Madison ecosystems! After familiarizing ourselves with the meaning of the Anthropocene and the diverse sorts of responses scientists, artists, and humanists propose to it, students will be asked to consider and create responses that index their own experience of the Anthropocene by working with technological and artistic media (both of which students will be trained to use). We will discuss the technological and artistic mediations students produce to understand how they locally respond to the global event called the Anthropocene.
Spring 2014
Functions of Public Intellectuals: Why Take Sides?
Broadly speaking, a public intellectual is someone who is trained in a specific area of knowledge and who decides to write and to speak to a “public” larger than a community of specialists. The goal of this class is to question the passage from the “inside” (the University, theoretical research, a peculiar discipline) to the “outside” (the public, the putting into practice of a theory, a universal address). The analysis of the passage from “inside” to “outside” will not lead us to reject these notions, but to complicate their location and their articulation. The main questions of the course will be: what is and where is intellectuality? What is political intellectuality? An act and if so what kind of act?
To answer these questions, I will divide the course into three parts:
– 1/ Universal, organic, specific: we will examine several definitions of the intellectual: “the committed intellectual” (Jean-Paul Sartre), “the organic intellectual” (Antonio Gramsci), and “the specific intellectual” (Michel Foucault). We will analyze “representations of the intellectual” (Edward Saïd) and the question of the “subaltern” (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). Here the goal will be to develop a concept of political intellectuality.
– 2/ Committing arts: Drawing on the works of Judith Butler, Toni Morrison, and Jacques Derrida, we will question the relation between intellectuals’ interventions and their practices of writing in the area of interconnected communication. Focusing on several poets and filmmakers (Mahmoud Darwish, Victor Hugo, Aimé Césaire, André Breton, Osip Mandelstam, Allen Ginsberg, and Jean-Luc Godard), we will try to understand the relation between artistic intellectuality and political interventions;
3/ The production of intellectuality: Starting with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “American scholar,” we will investigate the role of the university and its specific mission towards the public. We will study what Paolo Virno calls “mass intellectuality” and Donna Haraway “situated knowledges”. We will describe the emergence of a specified intellectuality, neither massive or universal, nor reducible to the figure of the specific intellectual.
Weird Lit.: Humans, Cyborgs, and Animals (Lecture Course)
This class will focus on the singular forms of being that people literature: humans and also non-humans, a vast category including animals, insects, plants, cyborgs, and robots. We will pay attention to the weird characters that we encounter in novels: Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote), Bartleby (Herman Melville’s “Bartleby”), a “blind but wise” old woman (Toni Morrison’s “Nobel Lecture”), and a Colonel beyond Good and Evil (Francis F. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now). We will meet a famous monster (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), neurotic superheroes (Alan Moore’s Watchmen), the prophet of the Overhuman (Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra), the frightening “horla” (Maupassant’s The Horla), and we will attend to the transformation of Gregor Samsa into an insect-like creature (Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis). We will also try to understand why robots can become more human than humans (Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot). These readings will lead us to reconsider the representations we have of humans, animals, and technological beings.
Fall 2013
Environmental Studies (Lecture Course – Nelson Institute)
Human beings are not only in the environment, for the environment is in them: the goal of this class is to shed some light on this surprising statement. What does it mean? Is it a joke? Definitely not: this statement describes our reality, our past and our coming daily-life. If you doubt, just think about any environmental issue: heat waves issuing from climate change (Madison summer 2012), hurricanes (Katrina 2005), etc. Whatever the problem, we discover the same reality: we are not separated from our milieu of life. What happens “outside” touches our inside very concretely.
This is our contemporary condition: we have a Facebook account, we keep texting and we are technologically addicted, yet we have some difficulty accepting our ecological interconnection. The challenge of this class is the following: instead of passively watching apocalyptic movies, instead of only complaining about dark ecological futures, we will strive to understand that environmental issues reveal that our “nature” is deeply tied with what we do, what we produce, what we consume, that is to say our ways of life. This understanding is the only way to propose pragmatic solutions to ecological threats.
To explore the situation of humans in our ecological era, this class will focus on cultural representations of human beings, technologies, nature, and non-humans (animals, plants) coming from cinema, literature and theory. These representations call intro question the same thing: what is the place of human beings vis-à-vis nonhuman beings? Does technology make human beings into gods, into supermen? Would human beings like to be Cyborgs? Or are human beings animals for good? In short, to think the environment as an entanglement of nature and technology is to think the puzzling question of the place of human beings.
Spring 2013
Outsides of the Thought
One of the basic watchwords of our time is the following one: “there is no outside”. Is this a true ontological statement and a useful political description? Or does it dissimulate something: a fear? An exo-phobia? Of course, we can understand why we have to be wary of the notion of the Outside: it seems to be the source of all idealisms, all the constructions of illusory worlds. To stand, to believe oneself to be standing outside of the world, is the best way to feel exempted of all obligation vis-à-vis this one, of all necessary political intervention. But what is politics without an outside, if not the mere acceptation of the world as it goes? And what is art without outside, if not a commodity? And what is thought without an outside, if not simulation and calculus? In order to answer these questions, we will analyze figures of the Outside – the unconscious, the Real, chaos, otherness, wilderness, etc. – in theory (psychoanalysis, philosophy, and quantum physics) and praxis (politics and art). We will read Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Heisenberg, Harman, Morton, Bennett, Snyder and Cronon. We will study art works (Godard, Innaritu, Lars von Trier, Blanchot, Auster and Greg Egan) and political texts (Marx, Laclau).
What is Theory? Philosophy and Literature
This class will try to answer two questions: 1/ What is theory? To investigate this first question, we will think about the relation of theory to similar notions, including metaphysics, deconstruction, abstraction, etc. We will also highlight the different uses of theory (theoretical, political, pragmatic, etc.). We will work on basic philosophical texts (Plato, Aristotle, Whitehead, James, Lévinas, Deleuze, Badiou), contemporary theory (Harman, Alaimo), literary theory (Eagleton, Sartre, Breton) and films. With Aimé Césaire and Toni Morrison, we will see how theory echoes with politics and poetry. At the end, our goal will be to identify the current combat zones of theory: what nowadays are the main fault lines along with theorists divide? Our second question will be: 2/ What is the function of the intellectual today? We will work on different notions and concepts: “the American scholar” (Emerson), “the organic intellectual” (Gramsci), “the engaged intellectual” (Sartre), “the specific intellectual” (Foucault), “mass intellectuality” (Virno), “situated knowledge” (Haraway) and the role of “the public intellectual”.
Fall 2012
Cinema at the End of the World
In this course we will try to describe the functions of cinema in an age of environmental disasters. Every session will be devoted to an apocalyptic movie that we will question with a theoretical text coming from cinema studies (Bazin, Kracauer), catastrophe theory (Zizek, Diamond), psychoanalysis (Freud) and philosophy (Husserl, Benjamin). For each movie, we will investigate if it records, distorts or projects reality (even if these three operations can obviously be combined). Indeed, we might think that apocalyptic cinema only imagines possible events: would its own goal be to distract us from the necessary coming of these events? Would it try to falsely avert, thanks to the imaginary, the real dangers that threaten us? Or is it possible to argue that cinema is able to show us what we might not be able to see without it? Fueling ours fears and our paranoia, cinema sometimes enables us to think what we refuse to think: the extinction of human beings, of life. Cinema tries to deal out justice with images when we refuse to see and to act politically to avoid catastrophes.
The Concept of Nature. From Heraclites to Latour via Hugo
In this course we will question why many contemporary thinkers try to get rid of the concept of nature. Of course, it’s necessary to reject several fantastical (and ideological) versions of nature when they are used to legitimate unequal, racist, sexist and humanist politics. But concerning the ecopolitical field, I argue that an “ecology without nature” (T. Morton) or “against nature” (Zizek) gives force to another fantasy: the fantasy of one-artificial world where everything can be constructed, reconstructed, changed and linked at will. Drawing on a number of crucial theoretical texts (from Aristotle to Whitehead), romanticist and surrealist poems (Hugo, Nerval, Novalis, Péret, Breton), novels or tales (Dillard, Hoffman), we will attempt to produce alternative conceptions of nature able to break the walls of our claustrophobic world. We will explore how nature can be used as a tool able to open societies and cultures to their contingency, their inside otherness as well as their real outsides.
Spring 2012
Societies of Clairvoyance: Climate, Time and Politics
Two main features define our societies: the control of life and the anticipation of catastrophes. But what kind of communities, what kind of social or personal relations, are possible in such a situation? In order to begin to address this question, we have to consider our strange relation with time and communication. We keep creating relations (both temporalities and communications) as fluid as our “liquid life” (Z. Bauman). And at the same time we protect ourselves against real events that interrupt this fluid time and these fluid communications, in doing so closing out events that might change our lives. We will try to shed some light on the link between these two aspects of our dangerous societies of clairvoyance. In this regard, it will be necessary to explain why the concept of chrono-politics is more relevant than that of biopolitics. If ecology has always been built around the concept of space, perhaps it’s now necessary to think about a real ecology of time. Over the course of the term, we will read Sedgwick, Foucault, Deleuze, Virilio and Bauman to understand the relation between time and politics. Nancy and Esposito will allow us to think the shape of a global community based on a time “out-of-joint.” In order to understand this concept of time, we will study some basic philosophical theories of time.
Sovereignty, Terrorism and Globalization
The goal of this course is to show that terrorism, sovereignty and globalization are nowadays inextricable. In this respect, it’s not possible to understand terrorism without explaining the logics of globalization (its technological, political and ecological aspects) and the base of sovereignty (its relation with the “state of exception” and power). To sum up, we can say that terrorism is 1) an act claiming to be sovereign in a world where sovereignty is in crisis; 2) an act beyond every limit in a world without limits. Terrorism seems to reveal the true nature of our globalized societies’ overexposure to risks. Over the course of the term, we will read Beck, Baudrillard, Derrida, Agamben, Zizek, and also Appadurai, Benjamin and Schmitt. We will supplement these theoretical texts with several movies, focusing particularly on If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front.
Fall 2011
Humanism, Antihumanism, and Posthumanism
The goal of this course is to show the interest and the limits of the concept of posthumanism. We will test the following hypothesis: is posthumanism a new avatar of humanism? Performing this test requires that we arrive at an accurate definition of humanism. The first part of the course will be devoted to attempt such a definition. We will use several key-texts of the so-called “humanist” tradition (from Plato to J.P. Sartre via Pico della Mirandolla and Marx), in order to show that humanism as such doesn’t exist. The second part will explore the critics of humanism, including Michel Foucault, Claude Levi-Strauss, Martin Heidegger and Alain Badiou. After defining humanism and antihumanism, we will focus the course on the question of Posthumans, Cyborgs, Androids and other “successors” (Ian Hacking, Dona Haraway, Cary Wolfe). Over the course of the term, we will supplement theoretical texts with a variety of texts, movies and other materials (video games, paintings and so on).
The Uses of Lacan
This course introduces students to Lacan using some of his more accessible texts, especially those of the 1950s. We will try to understand why the concept of the unconscious is so important for our times. Today we often understand the world as homogeneous, continuous and immanent. Yet Lacan after Freud argues that the unconscious is a “gap,” a real discontinuity affecting our daily life. What sort of “gap” is it? Is it only a negative concept? How might we use the idea of the unconscious in order to show the singularity of a given art work? Over the course of the term, we will read Lacan and other critics in order to develop an understanding of the concepts of the unconscious, the symbolic, the imaginary, the real, fantasy, the symptom and sexual difference. Apropos this last concept, we will bring Lacan into conversation with the work of the feminist theorists Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler.
ATOPIES 