2023 Session

In an intensive six-week course of study, faculty members, graduate students and independent scholars from around the world, in the humanities and social sciences, explore recent developments in critical theory. 

Participants work with the SCT’s core faculty of distinguished scholars and theorists in one of four six-week seminars. Each faculty member offers, in addition, a public lecture and a colloquium (based on an original paper) which are attended by the entire group.

The program also includes mini-seminars taught by scholars who visit for shorter periods. Finally, throughout the six weeks, distinguished theorists visit the SCT as lecturers.

The 2023 summer session at the School of Criticism and Theory will be held in-person in Ithaca, June 11 - July 20, 2023, modified to allow for appropriate social distancing and safety as necessary.

Six-Week Seminars:

Six-Week Seminars

	Martin Hägglund Birgit Baldwin Professor of Humanities at Yale University "The Fundamental Ontology of Life and Freedom" Profile
	Sandra Laugier Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne; Senior Fellow of Institut Universitaire de France "Concepts of the Ordinary" Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne Profile
	Alexandre Lefebvre Professor of Politics and Philosophy, University of Sydney "The First and the Last Liberal: Michel de Montaigne and John Rawls" University of Sydney Profile
	Dianne M. Stewart Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion & African American Studies; Interim Chair, Department of African American Studies; Faculty Coordinator, Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, Emory University "The Ties that Bind: Global Black Feminisms and Womanisms" Emory Profile

1-Week Mini-Seminars:

	Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi Professor and Chair, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University "Twentieth Century Islamic Political Thought: From Modernizing Islam to Islamizing Modernity" Princeton Profile
	Daniel Heller-Roazen Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University "Word and Omen" Princeton Profile
	Eva Illouz Directrice d’Études at the EHESS, Paris and Rose Isaac Chair of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem "The Politics and Economics of Emotions" Hebrew University of Jerusalem Profile
	Angela Onwuachi-Willig Dean and Ryan Roth Gallo & Ernest J. Gallo Professor of Law at Boston University "The Trauma of the Routine Revisited: A Study of Group-Based Traumas in Response to Legal Outcomes in High Profile Cases" Boston University Profile

Public Lectures:

	Amanda Anderson Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities and Director, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University "Political Psychology and the Literary Field" Brown Profile
	Bruno G. Bosteels Professor in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and Professor and Chair of the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University "The Jargon of Finitude" Columbia Profile
	Vivek Chibber Professor of Sociology at New York University "Consent, Coercion and Resignation — The Sources of Stability in Capitalism" NYU Profile
	Carolyn Rouse Ritter Professor and Chair of Anthropology, Princeton University "Live Free and Die: How Ontologies of Freedom are Killing Americans" Princeton Profile

Six-Week Seminars:

The Fundamental Ontology of Life and Freedom

Martin Hägglund

Birgit Baldwin Professor of Humanities at Yale University

This seminar is devoted to the fundamental ontological questions of what it means to be alive and to be free. Ranging from the most elementary forms of organic life to the highest forms of rational agency, the seminar seeks to explore why only living organisms can be free. We will begin by analyzing the ontological distinction between inorganic and organic forms of matter, which in turn will enable us to distinguish between the three possible forms of organic life (vegetative, animal, rational). We will then consider the distinctiveness of rational life in terms of our responsibility for the production and reproduction of our lives, which entails that we are answerable for our metabolism with nature and our relation to other living beings. We will pursue these questions of life, freedom, and responsibility by drawing a line from Aristotle via Hegel to Marx. We will also engage with some of the most important interpreters of Aristotle in the 20th century (Heidegger, McDowell, Foot, and Korsgaard), as well as with debates in current philosophy of biology. Throughout we will seek to illuminate both the theoretical and practical stakes of grasping the ontological relation between matter and form, life and death, freedom and rationality. 
 

Concepts of the Ordinary

Sandra Laugier

Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, Senior Fellow of Institut Universitaire de France

In his preface to Veena Das’ Life and Words, Stanley Cavell notes that the ordinary is that in our language that is, or that we constantly render as, foreign to ourselves – an invocation of the Wittgensteinian image of the philosopher as explorer of a foreign tribe. That is, a tribe where we find ourselves strangers in our own company. This intersection of the familiar and the strange, shared by anthropology and philosophy, is the location of the ordinary. The call, or return to, the ordinary, is neither obvious  (a given) nor a solution to our philosophical doubts.  It is traversed by the “uncanniness of the ordinary.” To study the ordinary means to encounter concepts of the ordinary, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson lists them in “The American Scholar”: “I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art or Provençal minstrelry; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. (Emerson 1837, 171). Emerson brings all thought back to the categories of the ordinary – the low, the close which stand precisely in opposition to the concepts of the great and the remote, and allow to “know the meaning” of ordinary life: “What would we really know the meaning of?  The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body”. Such a conception of the ordinary, for Cavell, stems both form American transcendentalism and from ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin). The course will explore the various concepts and territories of the ordinary: from everyday, common life, to everyday language; from moral perception to the ethics of care;  form ordinary ethics to anthropology; from perfectionist politics to radical democracy; finally, from Emerson’s ordinary aesthetics (“The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life”), to Cavell’s ontology of film in The World Viewed, and to 21st century TV shows. 

The First and the Last Liberal: Michel de Montaigne and John Rawls

Alexandre Lefebvre

Professor of Politics and Philosophy, University of Sydney

Liberalism is the main social and political ideology of the modern era. Its best-known doctrines, such as the rule of law, individual rights, division of powers, and internationalism are mainstays of advanced democracies around the world. Moreover, its ideas of individualism, privacy, tolerance, reciprocity, pluralism, and irony define the culture, selfhood, and psychology of our times.  In this seminar, we will undertake an in-depth study of two philosophers who stand respectively at the beginning, and perhaps the end, of the liberal tradition. First, we consider Michel de Montaigne’s Essays (1588) – one of the funniest books of philosophy ever written – that explores themes of skepticism, friendship, tolerance, cruelty, and selfhood at the dawn of the liberal age. Next, we turn to John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) to examine his influential ideas of justice, impartiality, fairness, merit, self-interest, moral education, shame, and love. The goal of the seminar is to achieve a better understanding of liberalism in general, especially as it informs our own personal sense of what makes for a decent and legitimate polity, and a meaningful and enjoyable life.

The Ties that Bind: Global Black Feminisms and Womanisms

Dianne M. Stewart

Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University

Black feminisms and womanisms are closely related but not mutually exclusive intellectual and social change traditions.  After nearly a half century of womanism’s emergence within academic discourses, scholars and the wider public still struggle to understand its capacious vision and multifaceted features across a range of scholarly disciplines and popular expressions. Moreover, many wonder about its tensive and harmonious relationship with Black feminism. This course invites participants to reflect on these issues by placing womanist and feminist scholarship from Africa and the African diaspora in a conversation that emphasizes the ties that bind the two traditions.  In so doing, we will address theoretical and ethical commitments that also distinguish Black feminisms and womanisms.  However, emphasis will be placed on crosscutting themes, such as love, motherhood/mothering, spirituality/religion, antiblackness, survival and care, that can inspire generative exchanges and scholarly innovation in both arenas of thought and praxis.  Through readings and discussion, this course will extend to participants opportunities to probe and expand the boundaries of Black feminist and womanist scholarship based upon their particular disciplinary locations and research foci.  On the other hand, by engaging a range of thinkers and ideas, the course also provides opportunities for those who situate themselves outside of womanist and/or Black feminist traditions to clarify and explore their distance from them through productive and collaborative reflection.  

Mini-Seminars:

Twentieth Century Islamic Political Thought: From Modernizing Islam to Islamizing Modernity

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi

Professor and Chair, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton
University

In this mini seminar, we will look at the intellectual history of political Islam during the long twentieth century. The seminar is divided into four parts 1. Colonial Encounters and Muslim critics of Colonialism; 2. The foundation of Muslim Brotherhood and the expansion of civil society; 3. Post-WWII, anti-colonial, national liberation movements and Islamist vanguard politics; 4. The Islamic Revolution in Iran, ideology critique, and new social movements. The basic premise around which this seminar is organized is the idea that in mid-twentieth century, political Islam was rearticulated from modernizing Islam to Islamizing modernity.  This rearticulation shifted the central concern of Islamism from the question of the “compatibility” of Islam with modernity to Islamism as a critique of modernity and the temporalities upon which it is constructed. 

Word and Omen

Daniel Heller-Roazen
Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Comparative Literature, Princeton University

Divination is a practice of inferring sense from seemingly random circumstance. Across cultures, it has been conducted through attention to diverse phenomena, from the flight of birds and planetary motions to physiognomy, the palm of the hand and coffee grounds. This seminar will explore some of the ways in which language has become an object of divination. From the unexpected sounding of oracles to everyday utterances significant on account of their formation and deformation, from ancient prophecy to medieval riddles, modern acoustical hallucinations and Freudian slips of the tongue and ear, we will discuss the practices of detection to which discursive portents have given rise in literature, philosophy, religion, philology and psychoanalysis. Works and authors to be discussed include Homer, the Bible, Cicero, Plutarch, Augustine, Chrétien de Troyes, Poe, Mallarmé, Yeats, Freud, Benjamin and Lacan.

The Contradictions of the Modern Subject

Eva Illouz
Directrice d’Études at the EHESS, Paris and Rose Isaac Chair of Sociology
at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Who and what is the modern subject constitutes one of the key questions of post World War II philosophy and Michel Foucault has undoubtedly most contributed to such an inquiry.  Yet at the same time he put the notion of the subject squarely at the center of such investigation, Foucault also curiously sapped it, its study becoming that of “techniques of subjectification” – the cultural techniques to perform freedom, autonomy or self-knowledge.  Foucault’s approach is the necessary departure point for any inquiry in modern subjectivity.  Yet, its limits have become glaring: it is indifferent to the economy and does not take seriously the subject. Foucault neglected the economy because discursivity had to make a clean break with materialism; and he had only a thin notion of the subject because he had no interest in the motivational structure of power, that is, why agents exercise power or why they participate in their own submission. In this view,  capitalism was yet another site for the deployment of disciplining processes and techniques and the self a mere criss-crossing of signs and discourses. By ignoring the powerful logic of markets and corporations on the one hand and the cultural thickness of the self on the other, Foucault  elided a vast and uncharted continent, that of capitalist subjectivity, how the self and intimate relationships have become the locus of intense economic exploitation. In this paper, I examine the deployment of a capitalist subjectivity in three sites: sexual capital; positive psychology; and the emotional commodity, what I call the emodity.

The Trauma of the Routine Revisited: A Study of Group-Based Traumas in Response to Legal Outcomes in High Profile Cases

Angela Onwuachi-Willig
Dean and Ryan Roth Gallo & Ernest J. Gallo Professor of Law at Boston University

This seminar focuses on how Black people as a group have experienced the routine acquittals and non-indictments of police officers and quasi-police officers (e.g., neighborhood watch volunteers or lay white citizens during the pre-Civil Rights era) who have beaten and/or killed Black people like Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and Breonna Taylor over the decades. Specifically, recognizing that cultural trauma occurs when members of a group are subjected to “a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness” that forever mark their memories and change their identity, this seminar examines the cultural or group-based trauma that is experienced by Black people in response to consistently exculpatory legal outcomes in police and quasi-police killing cases of other Blacks. In so doing, this seminar will examine the differences between psychological traumas and cultural traumas, the circumstances under which both psychological traumas and cultural traumas emerge, and the ways in which such cultural traumas have morphed, or not morphed, from the pre-Civil Rights era to the post-Civil Rights era.

Guest Lectures:

Political Psychology and the Literary Field

Amanda Anderson
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities and Director,
Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University

Despite extensive interest over the past few decades in the question of method, the literary field’s informing psychological frameworks are often not subject to much scrutiny, particularly its tendency to privilege psychoanalytic categories drawn from the tradition of Freud, Klein, and Lacan. One consequence of this field condition is that certain dominant psychological assumptions continue to have an ineluctable connection to, and constraint on, the field’s political imaginary. By shifting our attention to post-Kleinian object relations (Winnicott, in particular) and Axel Honneth’s work on recognition, dignity, and respect, we might begin to develop a political psychology more attuned to current challenges and more in line with some of the impulses behind the method debates.   

The Jargon of Finitude

Bruno G. Bosteels
Professor in the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and Professor and Chair of the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University

Taking Theodor W. Adorno's critique of Martin Heidegger and his disciples in The Jargon of Authenticity as a model, this lecture will engage polemically with the more recent version of the jargon, which in the wake of the defeat of the radical Left in the 1960s and 1970s has argued that thinking must first come to terms with its own finitude if ever it wants to avoid the excesses of dogmatism, voluntarism, decisionism, totalitarianism, and so on. Contrary to a widespread consensus, I will argue that this renewed emphasis on finitude, as the absolute limit beyond which humanity supposedly reaches only at the risk of "the worst," marks both a symptom of the failure of our political imagination to cross the boundaries of what is given and an attempt to disguise the ensuing depoliticization under the cloak of a newfound philosophical radicalism that is actually not so different as it thinks it is from the older existentialist fantasies of authenticity.

Consent, Coercion and Resignation — The Sources of Stability in Capitalism

Vivek Chibber
Professor of Sociology at New York University

One of the enduring puzzles of postwar social theory has been to explain the political stabilization of capitalism, after three decades during which it seemed to be teetering on the verge of collapse.  Inspired by the emergent New Left, theorists suggested that the key to the system's stabilization was the political incorporation of the working class, and this in turn was attributed to the force of culture and ideology.  I offer an alternative to this theory,  arguing that working class incorporation is indeed central, but that this is the product of structural pressures, not ideology.

Live Free and Die: How Ontologies of Freedom are Killing Americans

Carolyn Rouse

Ritter Professor and Chair of Anthropology, Princeton University

This talk will focus on my work in a rural community in California where white life expectancies are some of the lowest in the country. The county hit rock bottom after the wine industry and pot legalization failed to boost the economy. Climate change also ruined tourism given that lack of rain has led to rising levels of cyanobacteria in the lake. The only hope for the community has become an investment in health by a religious health organization. Using clips from a documentary-in-progress, I argue that a quasi-religious revitalization movement, led in part by Adventist Health, has become one of the only paths toward healing and rebuilding.

Click here to view or download the 2023 brochure.

The online application portal will open on November 7, 2022 and will close on the deadline of February 1, 2023.

Learn more and apply for the 2023 Summer Session here.