PHIL 340 - Seminar in Contintental Philosophy

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2016/17a: Neoliberalism and the Future of Citizenship. In recent months, newly published works by Judith Butler, Étienne Balibar, Wendy Brown, Sadri Khiari, and others have sought to critique a “neoliberal” vision of the human being as homo oeconomicus, or “economic man”, and offer an alternative vision of what constitutes social, political, and individual life. This shared critical project is not only giving a name and a theory to that which attempts to privatize and monetize every facet of contemporary life; it is also exploring new forms of community and public assembly based on the philosophical claim, from Aristotle to Arendt, that we are by nature political animals who desire to gather in different kinds of public space. From Butler’s work on gender and performative assembly to Balibar’s book on citizenship to the recent collaborative book What Is a People?, some of today’s leading Continental philosophers are inviting us to critique an era of “neoliberalism” and rethink the meaning of citizenship. Readings include new texts by Badiou, Balibar, Brown, Butler, Khiari, Rancière, and Santos as well as earlier work by Rousseau, Arendt, Hayek, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari.

One 3-hour period.