2015 Summer Seminars


2015 Summer Seminar: Secularism
The seminar will be devoted to exploring the concept and practice of "secularism" in the broadest sense – not only as a political doctrine of the separation of religion and the state but also as the attitudes, sensibilities, and emotional investments characteristic of "secular" life. We will read prominent texts on these topics critically, including theoretical works as well as ethnographies. Among the questions we will ask: How does secular life relate to political secularism? What do the defenders of "post-secularism" mean by that term? Can one sensibly speak of "pre-secularism," if not why not? How is "religion" defined and located in the different arrangements of the secular?


2015 Summer Seminar: Heidegger
Martin Heidegger is without doubt the most important, influential and infamous philosopher in the 20th Century Continental tradition. Being and Time is his magnum opus. The purpose of this seminar is to get a grip on what Heidegger calls his "existential analytic" through a series of lectures, directed readings and discussions. I will try and bring out the enduring relevance and illuminating power of Heidegger’s central thought, namely that the human being is a "thrown project" that is constituted by time and defined by anxiety, being towards death, finitude and history. It is my belief that once one has grasped Heidegger’s basic thought, then everything else changes in one’s approach to life. My aim in this mini-course is to make that happen.



2015 Summer Seminar: Racial Formations and Justice Today
This seminar will examine what it means to be “raced” in ways that mark certain bodies as dangerous, diseased, uneducable or infantile. From separate “poor doors” in New York City apartment buildings to walled national borders, from Ferguson, Missouri to the use of troops supposedly to confine diseases like Ebola, we will examine the legal, political and rhetorical framings that infuse our conceptions of living subjects, legal persons, non-persons and things. The line between human and subhuman, or person and thing, is given new urgency in an era when the limits of incarceration, torture, execution, human trafficking, medical experimentation, the delivery of due process, and the protection of human rights often turn on newly minted meanings of words like "enemy combatant," “thug,” "IQ," "underclass," "market choice," "terror" or "illegal immigrant." If slavery is "unthinkable" to most people today, why? How do we keep bringing the unthinkable back into being? What connection do historical taxonomies have to the contemporary perpetuation of genocide, segregation, surveillance, disappearance, starvation? What disconnections? What about us can remain "inalienable" in a world turned global marketplace? Whom we consider a person, whom we label less than fully endowed, are questions that inform some of the most urgent legal and political questions of our time. We will look at legal opinions, historical documents, as well as texts in philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, literary criticism, and popular culture.
