Violence, Death, and Questions of Method

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Rhetoric 240E
Instructor: Samera Esmeir (Rhetoric) & Stefania Pandolfo (Anthropology)

We enter the twenty-first century inhabiting a world of wars, occupations, destruction, insurgency and survival that affect collective experiences as well as the most intimate dimensions of personal life. While we are witnessing the eradication of forms of life on a planetary scale, in which some become unrecognizable and others merely disposable, the media and international organizations, among others, present us with what seem to be the two main available ethical and political avenues to address the contemporary moment. One is submitting to the authority of sovereign violence (either by endorsing preemptive military strikes or by naturalizing the totalitarian impulses of our times, however critically); the other is aspiring to a world beyond violence. The first scenario wishes to contain the event of violence within the law or the structure of sovereignty; the second wills violence out of life altogether. In different ways, both render violence unthinkable as such and possibly contribute to its proliferation. It is this rendering of violence and death unthinkable that our seminar seeks to interrogate. Through a number of explorations (philosophical, political, theological, psychoanalytic, juridical and anthropological) we will ponder the possibilities for “a-life” in the encounter with death and violence.

With Benjamin, Freud, and Fanon, but also inspired by reflections on life, death, and destruction emerging from traditions other than the critical Euro-American, we will interrogate the paradox of violence and cruelty in the liberal imagination, and will attempt to locate what Freud, in the midst of WWI, articulated as the systematic suppression of the capacity to think the experience of death. The course will inquire into the ethical and political work that this suppression accomplishes, as well as its contemporary metamorphosis in what might be seen as the coming back of death to the fore. In counterpoint, conceptualizations of violence, practices surrounding death, and the imagination of the Afterlife in other traditions will provide critical inspirations for the seminar. Specifically we will be guided by the works of thinkers asking questions from Africa, South Asia and Latin America, the ethnographic writings of anthropologists, as well as political-theological reflections on violence, justice, and ethics in the contemporary Islamic tradition.

Note concerning enrollment: priority will be given to Anthropology and Rhetoric students. Otherwise, please contact instructors

Course reader of supplementary materials include: Jalal Toufic, Abu-Hamid Al-Ghazali, Veena Das, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Shai Levi, Marc Nichanian, Michel Foucault, Thomas Hobbes, Karl Schmitt, Achille Mbembe, Maurice Leenhardt, Margaret Lock, Nasser Hussein, Ali Shariati, Allen Feldman, Robert Herz, Marcel Mauss.

Samuel Weber, Targets of Opportunit. On the Militarization of Thinking

Claudio Lomnitz, /Death and the Idea of Mexico/

Mehdi Abedi and Gary Lgenhausen (eds.), /Jihad and Shahadat: Struggle and Martyrdom in Islam /

Hannah Arendt, /On Violence /

Maurice Blanchot, /Death Sentence /

Sigmund Freud, /Beyond the Pleasure Principle /

Talal Asad, /On Suicide Bombing /

Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, /Al-Ghazali on Disciplining the Soul and on Breaking the Two Desires/: /Books XXII and XXIII of the Revival of the Religious Sciences/

Jane Smith, Yvonne Haddad, /The Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection /

Legal Rhetoric and Philosophy: Law and the Disciplines

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Rhetoric 240F, Section 1
Instructor: Marianne Constable

What does it mean to study the rhetoric of law?   Indeed, what is the rhetoric of law?  In this seminar, we will explore the ways in which Anglo-American law - as a practice that is very much related to texts and their the study - itself becomes the subject of studies and texts that ground themselves in the practices and discourses of non-explicitly legal disciplines.   Intended as an introduction to either or both legal studies and rhetoric, the course will survey a number of the approaches to law taken by contemporary scholars of law, history, sociology, philosophy, and economics. 

The first few weeks of the course will include general readings on law, language, and the practice of both, as those practices occur within and outside the “discipline” of law.  The remaining two-thirds of the course will focus on contract law as an example of a sub-area of law, which (like almost any other area of law) simultaneously serves as the subject-matter of other disciplines and raises rich philosophical and rhetorical issues.  Crucial issues in contract law concern the status of speech acts, of the subject who promises, and of the bindingness of both law and language.  These issues in contract involve disputes and decisions about interpreting writings, speech, and silences, which resonate far beyond the law.

Requirements include:

- seminar participation and presentations (number and formality to depend on seminar size);

- preparation of an annotated bibliography (either as background to the seminar paper or as a preliminary reading list in an area of law or a possible qualifying exam field);

- seminar paper (20 pages). 

Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Harvard U Press 1975

Euripides, Hippolytus, Loeb Classical Library No. 484  (1995)

Frug, Mary Joe, Postmodern Legal Feminism, Routledge 1992

Heidegger, Martin, On the Way to Language, Harper and Row 1982

Mertz, Elizabeth, The Language of Law School, Oxford U Press  2007

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Genealogy of Morals, Hackett Publishing 1998

Vico, Giambattista, On the Study Methods of Our Time, Cornell 1990

Photocopied readings: Foucault’s “Order of Discourse”; contract law cases and materials; and articles in sociology of law, legal history, philosophy of law, and law and economics, concerning contracts and/or promises

Recommended:

Foucault, Discipline and Punish

HLA Hart, The Concept of Law

The Rhetoric of Political Theologies

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Rhetoric 240G, Section 3
Instructor: Matthew Scherer

Concepts like modernity, enlightenment, secularization, religion, and political theology are contested both in academic discourse and in public dialogue more generally.  Suggestions that these terms have outlasted their usefulness are common--because they are over determined, plainly ideological or otherwise unfit for critical social analysis.  Today's events, however, demand theories that critically engage the relation between religion and politics.

This seminar will examine some of the many political theologies articulated in early Christian, medieval and early modern contexts with an eye toward tracing their reverberations in the rhetoric of contemporary political theory and contemporary politics.  How are current concepts of sovereignty, democracy, secularism and secularization in particular inflected by traditional political theologies?  To what extent and with what necessity do they reiterate established patterns, and how might they also articulate new conceptions of the relations between religion and politics?  In what ways do available theories of political theology illuminate contemporary politics, and how do they obscure its contours?

Readings to include:

Augustine, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Weber, Kantorowicz, Schmitt, Strauss, Blumenberg, Rawls, Connolly, Asad, Balibar, Derrida, de Vries, Harding, Mahmood, Hirschkind.

Performance Theory: Experiments in Critical Writing

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Rhetoric 240G, Section 4
Instructor: Shannon Jackson

This course investigates performance and performativity as theoretical concepts for interdisciplinary trends in theatre, visual, rhetorical, and cultural studies.  We will consider how performance complicates assumptions about embodiment, spectatorship, action, difference, agency, community, speech, public art, and the assumed division between theory and practice. While serving as a graduate introduction to performance theory that introduces disciplinary genealogies from theatre, visual art, anthropology, and speech-act theory, the course will also focus on how such paradigms have influenced scholarly argumentation.  We will consider experiments in so-called "performative writing" as well as "self-reflexive" ethnography while simultaneously considering how such experiments interact with inherited rhetorical conventions of argumentation.  Weekly reading will include, not only selected theorists and performance studies scholars, but also four to five weeks of experimental critical writing from fellow classmates.

Readings may include selections from the following: Aristotle, Austin, Brecht, Butler, Conquergood, Derrida, Foster, Fried, Hall, Joseph, Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Lepecki, Marx, Moten, Munoz, Phelan, Plato, Pollock, Roach, Schechner, Schneider, Sedgwick, Shostak, Taylor, Tyler, Turner, Williams

Rhetorical Theory

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Rhetoric 240G, Section 5
Instructor: Judith Butler

To Be Announced

Research Methods for Dissertation Writing

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Rhetoric 280
Instructor: Pheng Cheah

This seminar is designed to help students at the initial stage of dissertation writing to construct a detailed plan for dissertation research and to complete a dissertation prospectus. The seminar will meet once a week for three hours. Earlier meetings will be devoted to library research methods, working with electronic databases, the collection and analysis of data, and the compilation of a bibliography. A session will also be devoted to the appropriate format, style, and structure of a dissertation-length scholarly work as well as systems of citation and reference in both the social sciences and the humanities. The final part of the course will be devoted to the discussion of drafts of dissertation prospectuses. Some attention will also be paid to the writing of grant or fellowship applications. The seminar is intended to establish a supportive environment to counteract the isolation most dissertation writers experience. Each student will present at least two status reports during the semester and respond to questions from the instructor and fellow-students. Articles and chapters will be assigned for reading and discussion. The objectives of the seminar are:

(1) completion of a dissertation prospectus
(2) learning how to gather and deploy knowledge concerning the thematic content and fundamental problems of a student's chosen field and the relevant research methods in shaping a sound and reasonable course of scholarly inquiry
(3) learning how to contribute to one's own and others' learning through listening and providing input, feedback, references, assistance and support
(4) learning how to effectively articulate, summarize, and present a proposed course of dissertation research
Students are expected to work closely with their dissertation directors and committee members throughout all stages of dissertation writing. The feedback that is received on their projects from this course is not a substitute for the final evaluation of the prospectus by the dissertation director. The course is taken on a S/U basis. Satisfactory performance is evaluated on the basis of seminar participation and the draft prospectus submitted at the end of the semester.

Recommended Texts:

Kate Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses and Dissertations, 7th ed. (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007)
Wayne C. Booth, The Craft of Research, 2nd ed. (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003)

Problems in Teaching Rhetoric

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Rhetoric 300
Instructor: TBA

To Be Announced