New Configurations in Critical Theory: ‘Life’
Module number: 937Q3A
Tutor: Dr. Michael Jonik
Email: M.Jonik@sussex.ac.uk
Office: Arts B 327
Phone: 01273 (87)3044
Office Hours: Monday 11am-1pm, and by appointment
Course Meeting Schedule: Tuesday, 2pm-4pm, BH 252
There is nothing over which a free man ponders less than death; his wisdom is, to
meditate not on death but on life’. Spinoza, Ethics
‘The value of life cannot be estimated’. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols
Module Description
This module will be an introduction to a range of contemporary critical approaches that have
emerged not only out of the influential work of twentieth-century philosophy, literary theory, or
psychoanalysis, but also from a variety of disciplinary quarters. More specifically, our investigations
will be focused on the question of ‘life’ as it traverses four interrelated topoi – literature, aesthetics,
politics, and science – and comprises a number of pressing theoretical issues. These are: affect,
sexuality, desire, biopolitics, the body, precarity, animality, the posthuman, ecology and the earth,
materialisms, networks and information, or neoliberalism and debt.
Module Objectives
1. Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of contemporary debates in critical theory
2. Undertake close analyses of demanding critical and philosophical texts
3. Demonstrate the ability to conceptualise and write detailed, informed critical analyses in
connection to relevant critical materials
Assessment
1 x 5,000-word essay (100%) (See Study Direct for due dates and times).
In addition, each student will do one 10 minute in-class presentation pertinent to the day’s reading.
There are many avenues by which one can effectively present a text or an issue, yet the endpoint
should be the same: to open an engaging discussion.
Materials needed
The required primary texts we will be using are listed here:
1. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (Vintage, 1994)
2. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, 1998)
3. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (Verso, 2009)
4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Bloomsbury 2013)
5. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Polity, 2013)
6. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Duke, 2010)
7. Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit (Minnesota, 2007)
8. Thomas Lemke, ‘Vital Politics and Bioeconomy’, in Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction
(NYU 2011)
9. Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the TwentyFirst Century (Princeton, 2007)
Secondary materials will be found on Study Direct and in the Sussex Library. You must bring your
book and any Study Direct (SD) materials printed out with you to each seminar, so we can work on the
texts in detail. There are copies available at the campus bookshop, which is adjacent to the library.
Reading Schedule (subject to change)
1.
Introduction: The Concept of Life (22 September)
Georges Canguilhem, ‘The Concept of Life’ (Study Direct – hereinafter ‘SD’)
Michel Foucault, ‘Preface’ and ‘Classifying’ from The Order of Things
Recommended
Foucault, ‘Life: Experience and Science’ (SD)
Paul Rabinow and Carlo Caduff, ‘Life – After Canguilhem’ (SD)
2.
Life and Biopower (29 September)
Foucault, ‘Lecture 11: 17 March 1976’, from “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the
Collège de France, 1975-1976 (SD)
Foucault, ‘Lecture 1: 11 January 1978’, from Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at
the Collège de France, 1977-78 (SD)
Foucault, ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’ from The History of Sexuality, v. 1 (SD)
Recommended
Nikolas Rose, ‘Politics and Life’ from The Politics of Life Itself (SD)
Maria Muhle, ‘A Genealogy of Biopolitics: the Notion of Life in Canguilhem and Foucault’, in
Lemm and Vatter, The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism
(Fordham 2014) (SD)
Mary B. Mader, ‘Modern Living and Vital Race: Foucault and the Science of Life’ (SD)
3.
Bare life (6 October)
Giorgio Agamben, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Section Three: The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm
of the Modern’, from Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (pp. 1-12; 117-188)
Recommended
Roberto Esposito, ‘The Enigma of Biopolitics’, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (SD)
Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘From Biopolitics to Biopower’ (SD)
Rosi Braidotti, ‘The Politics of “Life Itself” and New Ways of Dying’ (SD)
Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, ‘Thoughts on the Concept of Biopower Today’ (SD)
4.
Precarious Lives (13 October)
Judith Butler, ‘Infinite Detention’ from Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and
Violence (SD)
Butler, selections from Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
Recommended
Nathan Schneider and Judith Butler, ‘A Carefully Crafted F**k You’ (SD)
Ann V. Murphy, ‘Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism’ (SD)
5.
Deleuze and Life (20 October)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, selections from Anti-Oedipus (SD)
Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Rhizome’, from A Thousand Plateaus (ATP)
Deleuze, ‘Literature and Life’ (SD)
Deleuze, 'Immanence: a Life' (SD)
Recommended
Todd May, ‘The Politics of Life in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze’ (SD)
Agamben, 'Absolute Immanence’ (SD)
Dan Smith, ‘A Life of Pure Immanence’ (SD)
John Protevi, ‘Deleuze and Life’, from The Cambridge Companion to Gilles Deleuze
Claire Colebrook, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (Continuum, 2010)
6.
Territories and Becomings; or, Who Does the Earth Think It Is? (27 October)
Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Geology of Morals’, ‘How Do You Make Yourself a Body
Without Organs?’ from ATP
Robert Smithson, ‘Entropy and the New Monuments’, ‘A Museum of Language in the
Vicinity of Art’, ‘Strata: A Geophotographic Fiction’, ‘The Spiral Jetty’ from Robert
Smithson: The Collected Writings (SD)
Recommended
Gregg Lambert, ‘What the Earth Thinks’ (SD)
Jakub Zdebik, ‘Strata and Sediment Under the Fog: Geological Landscapes in Smithson and Ewen
Considered Through Deleuze and Kant’ (SD)
John Protevi, ‘Geo-hydro-solar-bio-techno-politics’, from Life, War, Earth
Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene (Minnesota 2015)
7.
READING WEEK (3 November)
8.
Territories and Becomings 2: Animals (10 November)
Deleuze and Guattari, ‘One or Several Wolves’, ‘Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal…’, ‘Of the
Refrain’ (ATP)
Recommended
Giorgio Agamben, ‘Umwelt’ and ‘Tick’, from The Open (SD)
Canguilhem, ‘The Living and its Milieu’ (SD)
Leonard Lawlor, ‘Following the Rats: Becoming-Animal in Deleuze and Guattari’ (SD)
William Connolly, ‘Complexity, Agency, and Time’, from A World of Becoming (Duke, 2011)
9.
The Posthuman Sciences (17 November)
Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Polity, 2013)
Cary Wolfe, ‘What is Posthumanism?’ in What is Posthumanism? (Minnesota, 2010)
Recommended
Stefan Herbrechter, ‘A Genealogy of Posthumanism’ (SD)
Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature
and Informatics (Chicago, 1999)
10. New Materialisms (24 November)
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter
Recommended
Diana H. Coole and Samantha Frost, ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’ from New Materialisms:
Ontology Agency, and Politics (SD)
Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies
(Open Humanities Press, 2012) (Available for free to be downloaded here:
http://openhumanitiespress.org/new-materialism.html)
11. Networked Life: Control, Resistance, Disappearance (1 December)
Deleuze, ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ (SD)
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit
Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic
Terrorism (SD) And here: http://hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html#labelWillToPower
Recommended
Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman, ‘Mnemonic Control’ from Beyond Biopolitics (SD)
John Marks, ‘Information and Resistance: Deleuze the Virtual and Cybernetics’ (SD)
James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (Pantheon, 2011)
12. Neoliberal Biopolitics, or, Life in Debt (8 December)
Michel Foucault, ‘Lecture 9: 14 March and Lecture 10: 21 March 1979’, from The Birth of
Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78, pp. 215-265 (SD)
Wendy Brown, ‘Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics Lectures: Charting Neoliberal Political Rationality’,
in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone, 2015) (SD)
Thomas Lemke, ‘Vital Politics and Bioeconomy’, in Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction (NYU
2011)
Recommended:
Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Critique of Governmentality I: Does Liberal Governmentality Exist? Has it
Ever Existed? in Governing by Debt (Semiotext(e), 2015) (SD)
Mathieu Charbonneau and Magnus Paulsen Hansen Debt, ‘Neoliberalism and
Crisis: Interview with Maurizio Lazzarato on the Indebted Condition’, (SD)
Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter, The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and
Neoliberalism (Fordham 2014)
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (OUP, 2007)
Wendy Brown, ‘Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy’, in Edgework: Critical Essays on
Knowledge and Politics (Princeton 2005) (SD)
Further Reading
Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life (Routledge, 1997)
Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Polity 2013)
Timothy C. Campbell, Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to
Agamben (Minnesota, 2011)
Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze, eds., Biopolitics: A Reader (Duke, )
Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (Columbia, 2008)
Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics
(Duke, 2010)
William Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minnesota, 2002)
Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip, Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience
Hans Driesch, The History and Theory of Vitalism (1914)
Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minnesota, 2008)
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception
Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (Polity 2012)
James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (Pantheon, 2011)
Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (Minnesota, 2008)
Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge, 1989)
Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin 2004).
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and
Informatics (Chicago, 1999)
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis
Stefan Herbrechter, Posthumanism (Bloomsbury, 2013).
Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourse of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity
(Columbia, 2010)
Stuart Kaufman, Investigations (Oxford, 2002)
Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition
(Semiotext(e), 2011).
Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter, The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism
(Fordham 2014)
Brian Massumi, A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze
and Guattari (MIT, 1992)
H.R. Maturana and F. J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1979)
John Protevi, Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences (Minnesota, 2013)
Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the TwentyFirst Century (Princeton, 2007)
Ervin Schrödinger, What is Life? [1944] (Cambridge, 2013)
Daniel W. Smith and Henry Somers-Hall, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Gilles Deleuze
Eugene Thacker, After Life (Chicago, 2010)
Patricia Ticineto Clough, Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death,
(Duke 2012)
Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism
Digital Resources
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/foucault/ds.html
http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.co.uk/
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/
http://openhumanitiespress.org/glossator.html
http://parrhesiajournal.org/
http://tcs.sagepub.com/