GMAN 5020a / CPLT 5020a, Capitalism as a Form of Life  RAHEL JAEGGI

The critique of capitalism is thriving. But what, exactly, is the problem with capitalism? Is it flawed, unjust, irrational, or harmful? Is it evil or foolish—or does it simply fail to function? In other words, on what grounds can capitalism be criticized? Setting aside the simplistic accusation of individual greed, three distinct strategies of critique can be identified. First, there is the functional critique: capitalism, as a social and economic system, is inherently dysfunctional and prone to crises. The second is the moral critique, which argues that capitalism relies on exploitation and perpetuates injustice. The third is the ethical critique, which claims that life under capitalism is fundamentally alienating or impoverished, preventing individuals from achieving true human flourishing. These three accusations are as old as capitalism itself. They appear not only in “progressive” or emancipatory movements but also in nostalgic and conservative responses to the profound social changes capitalism has brought about. They are found in theoretical debates, political manifestos, literature, and film. This course explores these three lines of critique through a philosophical lens as well as through an examination of literature and films that engage with the issue. The central idea—that capitalism is not merely an economic system but a pervasive way of life that as such warrants critique—is made vivid and comprehensible through this exploration. Readings include Max Weber, Karl Marx, Werner Sombart, Georg Simmel, Theodor W. Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Upton Sinclair, Bertold Brecht, Thomas Piketty, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Quinn Slobodian.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

GMAN 5030a / PHIL 5523a, The Frankfurt School  Jacob McNulty and RAHEL JAEGGI

The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory was (is) a group of eclectic interdisciplinary Marxist philosophers and social scientists, active from the 1920s to the present. Most were German Jews born around the turn of the twentieth century. The Frankfurt School were a group of thinkers in almost perpetual exile. Simultaneously critical of American capitalism and of Soviet communism, they were expelled from their native Germany in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power. They also often lacked any intellectual safe haven, finding themselves at odds much philosophical and social-scientific orthodoxy (positivism, neo-Kantianism, “value-free” social science etc.). The critical theorists of the Frankfurt School sought to re-actualize ideas from the philosophical tradition, especially from Kant and Hegel, in order to address the complex realities of modern society: mass culture; fascism, totalitarianism, and authoritarianism; world war; imperialism; secularization; irrationality, sexuality, and aggression; and so on. This class looks at critical theory from a philosophical perspective, focusing on its claim to fuse traditional philosophy and radical social science. We begin with Max Horkheimer’s “Traditional and Critical Theory,” the school’s founding document which announces a break with the received “objectifying” approach to science and philosophy and inaugurates another based on the conviction that knowledge-production is continuous with economic production. We then consider the elusive worldview of Walter Benjamin, a fusion of religious mysticism and historical Marxism which would be so influential for the school. During the bulk of the course, we read two landmark works of first-generation critical theory. The first, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment develops a universal history and fundamental anthropology that understands the human being as seeking relief from fear by assimilating the unfamiliar to the unfamiliar. It places the legacy of the Enlightenment in question laying responsibility for the horrors of the twentieth century at its door. We also read Adorno’s Minima Moralia, a more personal, reflective work which foregrounds other less overtly political preoccupations of the institutes, e.g. modernism in literature and the arts; subjectivity, consciousness, and erotic desire; childhood, the family, and self-formation. We conclude by taking up Habermas’s attempt to revive the Enlightenment project together with a version of Kant’s transcendental project based on “the linguistic turn.” In this unit, we focus on selections from Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Theory of Communicative Action. Prerequisite: at least one prior course in philosophy, preferably in Kant or political philosophy.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

GMAN 5060a / CPLT 5065a, Bad Books  Kirk Wetters

Traditional humanities education always focused on “greatness”—but there is no denying the critical value and sometimes even the enjoyment of poor performances. In a world governed by norms and standards (against the appearance of laxness and relativism), “badness” and amateurism are inevitable. “Bad” works can be extremely popular and influential (e.g., in the cases of pseudoscience, misinformation, racism, antisemitism). The “bad” archive contributes to a reevaluation of critical standards, forms of official and unofficial censorship, freedom of speech and the function of taboos. The course explores famous works that have been considered aesthetically, morally, ideologically and politically pernicious (stopping short, however, of screeds and manifestos like Hitler’s Mein Kampf). Nevertheless, this course warrants a strong content warning. The range of our considerations is partly based on the students’ wishes and judgments.
HTBA

GMAN 5100a, “Sprachkrise”—Philosophies & Language Crises  Sophie Schweiger

The crisis of language predates the invention of ChatGPT (who may or may not have helped write this syllabus). This course delves into the concept of language crises and its long history from a philosophical and literary perspective, examining how crises of language are represented in literature and how they reflect broader philosophical questions about language, identity, and power. We explore different philosophical approaches to language, such as the history of language and philology (Herder, Humboldt, Nietzsche), structuralism and post-structuralism (Saussure), analytical and pragmatic philosophies (Wittgenstein), phenomenology and deconstruction (Heidegger), and analyze how these theories shape our understanding of language while simultaneously evoking its crisis. The course also examines how such language crises are represented and produced in literature and the arts, how authors and artists approach the complexities of language loss, and how crises help birth alternative systems of signification. Through close readings of literary texts by Hofmannsthal, Musil, Bachmann, et. al., we analyze the symbolic and metaphorical significance of language crises as well as the ethical and political implications of language loss for (cultural) identity. Experimental use of language such as DaDa artwork, performance cultures, and “Sprachspiel” poetry by the “Wiener Gruppe,” as well as contemporary KI/AI literature, further complement the theoretical readings. By exploring language crises through the lens of philosophy and literature, we gain a deeper understanding of the role of language—and its many crises—in shaping our understanding of ourselves and our communities.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

GMAN 5140a / CPLT 5140a / ENGL 5040a, What the University Was  Paul North

After this course, you might not know exactly where the university is going, but you should be able to say what it was once supposed to be, in its “modern” inception in Germany and in latter day materializations around the planet. The course is the interpretation of a particular dream. Who dreamed the dream of an institution that could be anywhere and contain everything important? How did its theorists think the unique nexus of power, economics, histories, and architecture that is, ideally at least, the university? How did they imagine it, given that it is a highly conflictual entity, riding the forefront of some transformations and at the same time codifying and regulating knowledges and social potentials? We read texts from the global archive called “critical university studies,” concentrating on articulations of the problems in theoretical texts. These include Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties, Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education, Nietzsche’s Anti-Education, Derrida’s Eyes of the University, Willy Thayer’s Non-Modern Crisis of the Modern University, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s Undercommons, and Roderick Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things.
M 3:30pm-6:30pm

GMAN 5333a, Kafka  Paul North

A name, a puzzle to be solved, a mirage-like figure provoking writers like Jorge Luis Borges to step beyond staid literary models, Jew, German, subject of the Kingdom of Bohemia, accident insurance lawyer, inventor of a device to make table saws safe, abject sufferer of tuberculosis, critic of philosophy and European culture, misogynist, queer, dreamer and recorder of dreams, jokester, refuter of Kierkegaard, challenger to Nietzsche, fabulist, reader of Freud, reader of Flaubert, reader of . . ., writer of short prose pieces “in a single breath,” diarist, novelist. Kafka.
T 3:30pm-6:30pm

GMAN 5460a / FILM 6460a, Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries: From A Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl  Austen Hinkley

Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries: From A Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl remains a monument of postwar German literature—and it was written in and about New York City. Across its 367 short chapters (each corresponding to a day of the year), the novel unfolds on three levels: the historical present in New York, memories and family history from Germany, and reporting from the New York Times on current events. The result is a view of life, politics, and history in the middle of the twentieth century that is as rich and expansive as it is fragmented. The social and political climate of New York in the late ’60s is put into contact with memories of the rise of Nazism in Germany; reporting on the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, and the Prague Spring is refracted through the lenses of the protagonist’s past life in East Germany and her new life raising her daughter alone in New York. This course undertakes a close reading of Johnson’s sprawling novel with attention to its many historical, political, and literary contexts. Readings from the novel will be complemented by relevant short readings in theories of media, politics, literature, and history. No prior knowledge of German language and literature is required.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

GMAN 5710b / CPLT 7880b, Robert Musil’s Man without Qualities: The End of the Novel  Rudiger Campe

Musil’s gigantic Man without Qualities (published 1930–33, 1943) is one of the quintessential modernist (interwar) European novels. After looking into Musil’s earlier narrative experiments, the course begins with the close reading of part I of the novel and then focuses on the main strands of its narrative network: modernization and mysticism; the end of old Europe and the rise of fascism; the Vienna Circle’s epistemology and the legal doctrine of accountability; love and violence. The intertwining of essay and narration in the novel, the theory of the novel in the novel, and the question of prose as form are at the core of the course. Readings in English or German. Discussions in English.
HTBA

GMAN 6500b / CPLT 5240b, Critique and Crisis  Kirk Wetters

In our time, when everyone is suspected of being hypercritical, it is not surprising that the limits of critique, its function, and institutional location are called to question. The idea of “post-critique” has been much discussed in recent years. This course develops critical models, primarily from the German tradition, in order to show the great variety of options available beyond the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Topics include post-critique, the history of critique/criticism, the Romantic concept of critique, traditional vs. critical theory, historicism, philology vs. hermeneutics, science (Wissenschaft) vs. the critique of positivism. Main protagonists include Kant, Schiller, Schlegel, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Max Weber, Lukács, Husserl, Benjamin, Adorno, Koselleck, Szondi, Gadamer, Gumbrecht, Latour, Felski.
HTBA

GMAN 7090b / CPLT 6180b / JDST 7680b, Walter Benjamin’s Critical Theory  Paul North

Careful analysis of central texts in Benjamin’s oeuvre in the context of his philosophical, political, and literary reading.
HTBA