2027 Summer Seminars
the sexual politics of fascism
How does gender figure in fascist ideology and fascist movements? How do notions of masculinity and femininity circulate on the Right, in conservative and in counter-revolutionary discourse? What distinguishes a conservative sexual politics from a fascist sexual politics? In this seminar, we will consider how the Right speaks to and about men, how it speaks to and about women, how this has changed over time, and how this varies across place. We will also look at the new fascisms emerging in different parts of the world, for how they are like and unlike fascisms of the twentieth century and how they deploy sex in new and old ways. Our readings will focus on theoretical and interpretive studies of fascism, from marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic perspectives. We will study the writings of Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Klaus Theweleit, Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Maria Macciocchi, Andrea Dworkin, Dagmar Herzog, and Judith Butler.
Robyn Marasco is the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science at The New School for Social Research. She is the author of The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel, as well as several articles in leading social science and humanities journals. Her next book, Elements of a Political Theory of the Family, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
World history in the web of life
This seminar explores and reconstructs the history of capitalism as an evolving and crisis-generating web of life power, profit, and life. It mobilizes historical, theoretical, and methodological insights from a diversity of critical traditions. Key themes include climate history, economic crises, popular revolts, and imperialism, in their entangled social, geopolitical, and cultural registers. Throughout, we pursue opportunities for synthesis between social relations and environmental history, broadly conceived, rethinking critical theory at every juncture.
Jason W. Moore teaches world history at Binghamton University. He is the author of Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015) and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2017).
On Debility: A Critical Genealogy
Debility asks how populations are made and how individuals come to live within conditions of stratification. To be concerned with debility is to be alert to the differentially distributed aches and pains of everyday life and the ordinary practices of injuring that are obscured by time, distance, political, economic and relational opacities. Debility, as a conceptual category, denaturalises violence in all its dimensions and the making of worlds through withholding resources, deliberate acts of (unremarked upon) injury, and injurious infrastructure. Debilitation foreshortens life and possibilities for thriving, and treats living with injury as normative for some populations. Moreover, creating the structural conditions for debilitation justifies violence, as the mechanisms through which debilitation is secured becomes invisible and debilitated populations appear in need of governance.
In recent years, the concept of debility and the framework of debilitation has become more prominent in scholarship and political organizing to grapple with the ongoing violences of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and mass forces of exploitation, expulsion, and extermination. Debility is being used to conceptualize normalized (and thus invisibilized) structural assaults to embodied and psycho-affective wellbeing through biopolitical racism and inequalities of gender, sexuality, class, nationality among other markers of difference. As a conceptual apparatus in global south literatures, debility marks the prior to, beyond, or backdrop of normativity and disability to foreground the massification of availability for injury in contrast to minoritized liberal rights politics accorded to disability. This seminar will contend with emergent genealogies of debility to ask how structures of inequality are being materialized, rendered ordinary, and justified.
Jasbir K. Puar is Distinguished Faculty of Arts Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of the award-winning books The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007, 2017). Her books and articles have been translated into more than 25 languages. Puar is the co-author of exhibitions for the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019) and the Sharjah Art Biennial (2023). In 2019 she received the Kessler Award from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies (CLAGS) at CUNY for lifetime achievement in queer research and organizing.
on interiority
If every concept, like any other modern tool for thinking, cannot but presuppose interiority, as formulated in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, as its domain of operation, how can interiority itself be brought under interrogation? How can it become available to its own (our mental) tools?
In this seminar we consider whether and how Blackness, as a tool of raciality (that is, racial difference and cultural difference) — the symbolic arsenal that plays in both the ethic-economic and an ethic-juridic corner of the liberal political architecture — can guide an analysis of interiority able to expose how it has operated in the accumulation of capital in the past two hundred years or so.
The artist and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at New York University. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (UMP 2007), Unpayable Debt (Sternberg / MIT Press 2022) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)
Her artwork includes the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020) and Ancestral Claims/Ancestral Clouds (2023) in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational artistic practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri.