This seminar will explore the conditions of possibility for historicizing thought, and apprehending forms of life that are proximate to, yet incommensurable with normative categories of social analysis predicated on assumptions of liberal modernity. Our inquiry is inspired by two sets of critical interventions that challenge us, together and separately, to think about a truly global history of social thought. The first draws on political philosopher Jacques Ranciere’s long-standing work on “intellectual emancipation,” especially his emphasis on separating “orders of thought” from “social order” as a way of challenging foreclosures in the history of social thought. The second engages historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s injunction to “provincialize Europe.” Does provincializing Europe require, instead, that we universalize other forms of life? What kinds of pressure do terms like “bare life,” “Dalit,” “Negro,” “subaltern,” “lumpen,” or “woman” place on concept-formation?
Readings for the seminar will include a mix of classic texts of social theory and intellectual history, as well as monographs in history and anthropology that seek to engage and redirect the energies of social thought toward non-Western accounts of concept formation, translation, commensuration, and alterity.
