Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Hirsch (mh2349@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, “Intimacy seminar.” In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

Instructor: D. Leshem

Michel Foucault’s recently published lectures (The Birth of Biopolitics, 2008) shed new light on late-modern governmentality. He examines the liberal thought of the late 18th to early 19th century, as well as neo-liberal thought as it evolved in post-war Germany and The United States. Within this context he conducts a close reading of texts composed by British political economists, post-war German economists from the Freiburg School, and Chicago School 1970’s economists.

This reading led Foucault to offer original and illuminating answers to these questions—what is the art of government unique to Neo-Liberalism? How do its singular configuration of economic theory, ‘security mechanisms’ and society stem from 19th century liberalism and how are they distinguished from it? This course will be based on readings of Foucault’s lectures accompanied by primary sources, while addressing Keynesian economics and recent developments in the field of economic theory for further context.

A close reading of some of Freud’s major works focusing on the changing theories of repression and sexuality  in his evolving and contradictory understanding of the functioning of the mind, “the apparatus of the soul”.

The readings include some (most) of the following: Studies on Hysteria (1895), Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), On Narcissism (1914), some of the Papers on Metapsychology (1915), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) .

Requirements: regular attendance, comments (1-2 page max) on each reading (due Sunday before each Wednesday class), a short term paper.

The aim of this course is to introduce the work of Laplanche which is widely known outside the Anglophone community but until quite recently was little known in English largely because very little had been translated into English.  Until 2011 nothing of his work after 1993 had been translated into English except the odd article here and there. His works complete works – some 14 volumes – have been translated into Spanish and Italian and at least as much as exists in English translation exists in German and Portuguese.  This course hopes to be part of correcting the deficit.

The emphasis will be on his recent work which is very much the culmination of this theorizing and also reflects a kind of ‘late style’ in the sense owing to Edward Said.  By starting with some of the most recent texts, not only will we immediately focus on Laplanche’s major contributions, but also make it possible to see how his early thinking opened the domain in which he would make those contributions.  It will also make easier and more fun to read the earlier work which is at times can be difficult when it is condensed, abstract and rapid fire while at other times it is difficult because it is so closely argued and detailed.

This lecture examines gender and sexuality as an important lens through which to understand questions of empire, colonialism, and anti-colonial nationalism. By so doing the lecture brings the perspectives of historians of gender, who have highlighted the importance of issues such as marriage, domesticity, respectability, and of female enfranchisement to the study of imperial governance. Thus the course addresses the relationship between ideological and material structures of power and historical experience, and examines the relationship between categories such as race, class, religion, and sexuality in imperial contexts.

In particular, we will examine contentious issues that shaped debates about women and gender including: domesticity; religion and secularism; demands for political rights and citizenship; cultural violence, and sexuality. The lecture course is organized around three broad periods: 1) the development of ideas of domesticity and conjugality in conjunction with the rise of racial states during the nineteenth century; 2) the development of gendered ideologies in colonial locales during the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, and 3) the impact of colonial configurations of gender and sexuality in shaping the “woman’s question” during and well after decolonization.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Application Instructions: E-mail Professor Hirsch (mh2349@columbia.edu) by noon on Tuesday, November 6th, with the subject heading, “Feminism seminar.” In your message, include basic information: your name, school, major, year of study, and relevant courses taken, along with a brief statement about why you are interested in taking the course.

Instructor: N. Tadiar

Since the modern recognition of the historicity of arrangements of collective existence, scholars have sought to understand different kinds of social formation and their underlying laws of organization and cohesion. “Cultures,” as ‘whole ways of life,’ has been an abiding concept for thinking not only about the complexity, variability and dynamic movement of the material social relations comprising distinct communities but also about symbolic, communicative, representational and performative practices (art, literature, photography, film) and their production of an ‘inner,’ immaterial life of shared meanings and experiences.

This course explores theories of forms of life, human and social, which have been seen to develop in the course of a global history of contemporary modernity, with an attention to the role of aesthetics and affect, communication technology and built form in shaping and expressing dominant as well as marginalized and/or alternative forms of sociality, subjectivity and collective being and experience. We will examine several scholarly literatures that deal with issues of beauty, embodiment, sensory experience, pleasure, pain, subjectivity and structures of feeling, and their relations to questions of gender and power, social order and struggle, and historical change. We will also look at questions of biopolitics, violence and the limits and possibilities of different humanist and post-humanist conceptions of “life” for understanding politics in contemporary contexts.

Readings include Marx, Benjamin, Buck-Morss, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Rancière, Esposito, as well as contemporary feminist ethnography of Southeast Asia.

Instructor: R. Pollack and M. Pollack

This 4 point seminar on Human Identity is taught by colleagues from four different disciplines; Law, Religion, Science, and Medicine. EEEB W4321 Human Identity fulfills requirements for majors in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology and in the new major of Medicine, Literature, and Society (MLS) offered by the Institute in Comparative Literature.  It is also an elective for seniors in the Department of Sustainability and Development and is cross-listed with the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race.

The course focuses on human identity, beginning with the individual and progressing to communal and global viewpoints using a framework of perspectives from biology, genetics, medicine, public health, psychiatry, religion and the law. W4321 evolved from a Columbia College Core Capstone course INSM4321 in 2009 which developed initially from a Ford Foundation grant to the Center for the Study of Science and Religion for “A Difficult Dialogues Course: Human Nature.'”

As a graduate level course, it is open to interested seniors and graduate students including those from the Medical Center campus. Columbia University is dedicated to facilitating equal access for students with disabilities.  Please let one of the instructors know through the Office of Disability Services if you need special accommodations because of a disability.

Reconfiguring the modern legacy of humanism in light of new demands of thinking about the human sciences. Response to challenges of both anti-humanist and post-humanist critiques by positing the question “what is human?” in the domains of psyche, pedagogy, politics, as well as through the prisms of feminist epistemology and recent philosophical ruminations on the animal and the machine.