Politics and Aesthetics: Recent Trends in Critical Theory
Coordinators: Dr Paul Rae (Theatre Studies) and Dr Tania Roy (English Literature), Department of English Language and Literature, NUS
Project Description and Scope
The aim of this reading group is to survey and assess recent developments in critical theory for the arts, humanities and social sciences.
This is prompted by a marked shift in the critical landscape that has taken place since roughly the turn of the millennium. Following in the wake of the major – indeed, canonical – figures of post-structuralism (Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Kristeva, Lyotard, Levinas and, to an extent, Deleuze and Baudrillard), a range of other writers are now coming to prominence in the Anglophone academy. They include: Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Serres, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bruno Latour, Antonio Negri, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler, Jean-Luc Marion, Slavoj Zizek, Lorenzo Chiesa and Roberto Esposito.
Many of these philosophers and theorists have been active for several decades, and their work is diverse in scope and approach. However, recent years have seen a substantial rise in new publications, re-statements of key ideas, first-time English translations of older works, surveys of the field, and a notable re-purposing of selected post-structuralist ideas.
These writers are now setting the critical agenda across numerous disciplines. But what is the significance of this development, and of the ideas being explored? Granted, the very explosion of publications in this area suggests there are reasons for skepticism: a renewed assault by the theory industry on an academic market otherwise fatigued and fast losing interest in dead philosophers. However, it is also clear that many of the themes being addressed in such work – democracy, activism, militancy, animality and the status of the human, eventhood, representation, cultural production, political and economic exclusion, social complexity, testimony – are central to understanding what might generically be termed the post-9/11 world in an age of globalization.
In order to understand the implications of this development, the proposed reading group will consider representative works by some of the key figures referenced above. Given the diverse ideas under consideration, our approach will be correspondingly inter-disciplinary, drawing on expertise from across faculties, and paying particular attention to the consequences both of and for our distinctive geographical and cultural location. At the same time, we propose to focus both the selection of readings and the resulting discussions by addressing what we believe to be a key theme: the writers’ treatments of the relationship between politics and aesthetics.
Last semester's reading (see below for details) took the form of a critical survey of recent, widely translated and well-marketed works on cultures of late capitalism, globalization, bio-politics and governmentality. Thus far all the works have come out of Continental European traditions of philosophy, social and cultural theory (Latour, Badious, Agamben, Nancy, Rancière). Our intention in the coming semester is to diversity the scope of the reading somewhat, as well as to consider questions that inevitably arise out of reading those kinds of texts in this part of the world. This concerns how theory might ' travel' in order to clarify parallel or competing versions of modernity, and what reformulations or alternatives may be more appropriate. In addition, we are in the process of confirming an invited speaker, who will participate in a workshop with the group around mid-October.
Meeting Schedule and Events
To sustain consistent and productive cross-disciplinary engagement over the year, we request that those who wish to participate as core members attend regularly. The initial interest in the group has exceeded the upper limit of 15 members. Please contact Paul Rae (ellrpa@nus.edu.sg) or Tania Roy (ellrt@nus.edu.sg) if you would like to join the group.
Frequency of meeting: every three weeks.
| Venue: | AS5/05-09A (ELL Graduate Reading Room) |
| Time: | Every third Wednesday evening from Week 3, 6pm-9pm. |
N.B. Participants are expected to read at least one of the two titles per session. Books are circulated by the co-ordinators in advance
26 August- Negri, A. (2008) The Porcelain Workshop: A New Grammar of Politics (Semiotext(e))
- Dussel, E. (2008) Twenty Theses on Politics (Duke University Press)
16 September
- Delanda, M. (2006) A New Philosophy of Society Continuum)
- Braidotti R. (2006) Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Polity)
7 October
- Lingis, A. (2007) The First Person Singular Northwestern University Press) and other texts by Lingis
28 October
- Marazzi, C. (2008) Capital and Language: From the New Economy to War Economy (Continuum)
- Xudong Zhang (2008) Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press)
18 November
Wrap-up discussion
Semester 2 (AY2008/9): Reading schedule
10 February- Latour, Bruno. trans. Catherine Porter. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. 2006 [1991].
3 March
- Badiou, Alain. trans. Alberto Toscano. Handbook of Inaesthetics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2004 [1998].
24 March
- Rancière, Jacques. trans. Gabriel Rockhill. The Politics of Aesthetics. London and New York: Continuum. 2007 [2000].
14 April
- Agamben, Giorgio. trans. Kevin Attel. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2004 [2002].
28 April
- Nancy, Jean-Luc. trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. The Creation of the World or Globalization. New York: SUNY Press. 2007 [2002].
List of Participants
-
Dr Paul Rae (English Language and Literature) [ellrpa@nus.edu.sg]
- Dr Tania Roy (English Language and Literature) [ellrt@nus.edu.sg]
- Dr Timothy Amos (Japanese)
- Dr Ingrid Hoofd (Communications and New Media)
- Dr Denisa Kera (Communications and New Media)
- A/P John Phillips (English Language and Literature)
- Dr Luke O’Sullivan (Politics)
- Ms Anne Marie Schleiner (Communications and New Media)
- Dr David Teh (English Language and Literature)
- A/P Bobby Wong (Architecture)