Ethnic Studies
257B: Social Theory
A Critique of the
Modern Political Subject
Office location: 225 Social Sciences Building
Office Hours: Mon
(
& Tu (
Tel.: 4 -3405 Email: dsilva@weber.ucsd.edu
Any
critique of the modern political (juridical-moral) subject needs to address two
accounts of the powers of universal reason. First, it meets Hegels formulation
of the transcendental subject, the self-producing force which mediates/produces
the relationship between self-consciousness and the things of the world
(including consciousness itself). Second, it needs to contend (dismiss, incorporate,
or translate) critiques of modern representation, in which violence guides
accounts of how the political subject emerges always already as an effect of
exteriority of existence as such, whether before the law or of the (economic,
sexual, or racial) other. During the last hundred and fifty years, the
privileging of existence over presence (as the actualization of an essence
which refers back to its own transcendence) has delimited a productive position
from which to challenge the writing of the political thing as the self-present
subject.
In this
seminar, the ethical fractures the critique of existence exposes will guide an
exploration of the radical onto-epistemological shift they hide. While not a
complete rupture with modern thought, this promise suggests a critical venue
which engages a constitutive, and yet consistently denied, dimension of modern
representation. Our exploration of its potentials will be guided by one
question: whether and how the analysis of presence provides a path for engaging
the ethical challenges facing critics of the contemporary global conditions?
Because any answers to this question will necessarily remain before us, our task will be solely to
tease out possible venues of intervention.
Weekly e-mail
comments (1,500 words) 40%
Discussion
mediation 30%
Participation 30%
I. OUTLINE
Week One (March 29):
Introduction
Week Two (April 5):
The Juridical-Moral Thing
Descartes Meditations
Locke The Second Treatise of Civil Government
Leibniz Monadology
II. THE ETHICAL
THING: OF PRESENCE
Week Three (April 12)
& Four (April 19): The Transparent I
Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit
Week Five (April 26):
The Social Subject
Marx The German Ideology (Part I) and Grundrisse (Introduction)
Freud Outline of Psychoanalysis
Week Six (May 3): The
Racial Subject
Ture & Hamilton Black Power
Fanon Wretched of the Earth
III. critical (re)TurnS:
OF Existence
Week Seven (May 10):
Sexuality
Irigaray The Ethics of Sexual Difference
Week Eight (May 17): Undecidability
Derrida Politics of Friendship
Week Nine (May 24):
Factuality
Week Ten (May 31): Globality
Silva Homo Modernus (Selections)