This seminar, which is run in collaboration with Incite Seminars, will elucidate the fundamental tenets of Marx’s philosophy, as well as their importance for understanding and transforming the contemporary world order. It will begin by explaining key concepts like historical materialism, class struggle, alienation, the labor theory of value, ideology and revolution. It will then briefly discuss a few of the important debates in the deep and broad history of Marxism in order to explore some of the ways that Marx’s work has been interpreted and transformed by subsequent generations. Finally, the course will focus in on what Marxist analysis has to contribute to contemporary debates and struggles by demonstrating how it can help us understand phenomena such as the environmental catastrophe, the increasing social inequality of globalization, the carceral state and its relationship to electoral democracy, the military-industrial-academic complex, institutional racism and gender inequality. Although the course will be directed at a lay audience, it will pedagogically build up its analysis in such a way that it will also serve the interests of those with a working knowledge of Marx and Marxism.

Facilitator: Gabriel Rockhill, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University and Director of the Critical Theory Workshop. His main areas of research are modern and contemporary thought, social and political theory, continental philosophy, aesthetics, and historiography. Gabriel is the author of Radical History & the Politics of Art; Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics; Logique de l’histoire: Pour une analytique des pratiques philosophiques; Contre-histoire du temps présent: Interrogations intempestives sur la mondialisation, la technologie, la démocratie, as well as numerous articles, book chapters, reviews, and edited books.

Date: Saturday, November 23, 10am-2pm.
Location: The Bourse, 111 S. Independence Mall East, Conference Room 5A, (Incite Seminars), Philadelphia. Map.
Readings:

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (excerpt)
• Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach“
• Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down(excerpt)
• Barbara Foley, “Intersectionality: A Marxist Critique”

Cost: Pay-what-you-can, up to $90

We are committed to making our offerings of knowledge, dialogue, and community available to anyone who feels they can benefit from them, regardless of ability to pay. We trust you to pay what you can currently afford. If you can not afford to pay anything, but feel you can benefit from our seminars, we wholeheartedly encourage you to register for free. For others, please bear in mind that a seminar costs nearly $1000 in labor and expenses to run.

Registration

Click here for information about registering for the seminar.

The Critical Theory Workshop has organized a Spring Symposium in Philadelphia with the transdisciplinary working group Counter-History & Theory, in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania. This is the first in a series of symposia planned for the coming years. Please find all of the details below. The flyer can be downloaded here.

Counter-History & Theory
An interdisciplinary symposium on the history of contemporary theory and theory’s role in the practice of history
April 26, 2019, 1-5:30 p.m
University of Pennsylvania
Fisher-Bennett Hall, Room 401
3340 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Organizers: Andrew Baird, Jennifer Ponce de León & Gabriel Rockhill
Sponsored by the Critical Theory Workshop, the Working Group on Counter-History & Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of English

This event is free and open to the public

The Counter-History & Theory working group is comprised of scholars in multiple fields who work at the intersections of theory and history. They are invested, in their diverse but overlapping projects, in both rethinking the historical formation of contemporary theory and re-theorizing history per se.

The spring symposium is an opportunity for members of the working group to present their current research projects in a rigorous and discussion-oriented format.

Program
Every presentation will include ample time for discussion and debate.

1 pm    Ethan Kleinberg and Gary Wilder in conversation with Warren Breckman, “The Role of Theory in Critical History: A Manifesto and Its Consequences”
Material for discussion:
“Theses on Theory and History” (2018) by Ethan Kleinberg, Joan Wallach Scott and Gary Wilder

2:30    Break

2:45    Gabriel Rockhill, “From Counter-History to Subterranean History: Soft Power and theConstruction of ‘French Theory,’” on the effects of the CIA’s cultural Cold War
Respondent: Jennifer Ponce de León

4 pm    Kristin Ross, “The Seventh Wonder of the ZAD,” on militant occupations (zones à défendre) in France

5:30    Public reception in Fisher-Bennett 135

Participants:

Warren Breckman is the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where his work focuses on modern European intellectual and cultural history. His books include Karl Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (1999); European Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents (2007, 2015); and Adventures of the Symbolic: Postmarxism and Radical Democracy (2013).  He is currently working on three projects: The Machiavellian Moment in Modern Thought; a micro-history of World War One based on the diaries of a Canadian cavalryman; and The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought(forthcoming, 2019) which he is editing with Peter E. Gordon.

Ethan Kleinberg is Professor of History and Letters at Wesleyan University and Editor-in-Chief of History and Theory. He is the author of Haunting History: for a deconstructive approach to the past (Stanford U Press), Generation Existential: Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-61 (Cornell U Press), and co-editor of the volume Presence: Philosophy, History, and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century (Cornell U Press). As a member of the Wild On Collective he is co-author (with Joan Wallach Scott and Gary Wilder) of the Theses on Theory and History.

Jennifer Ponce de León is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also faculty in Latin American and Latino Studies. Her forthcoming book Another Aesthetics is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War (2019) examines experimental and extra-institutional visual art, literature, and performance produced since the late 1990s that is articulated with antisystemic movements in the Americas, including Zapatismo, anti-displacement struggles in Los Angeles, and radical human rights activism and other urban social movements in Argentina. She is Associate Director of the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de Théorie Critique and a 2018-2019 Ford Postdoctoral Fellow.

Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher, cultural critic and political theorist. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University and Founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de Théorie Critique at the Sorbonne and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. His recent books include Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy(2017), Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics(2016) and Radical History & the Politics of Art(2014). In addition to his scholarly work, he has been actively engaged in extra-academic activities in the art and activist worlds, as well as a regular contributor to public intellectual debate. For more information: https://gabrielrockhill.com

Kristin Ross, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at New York University, is known for her work on French literature and culture of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. She is the author of Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune(2015); May ’68 and its Afterlives(2002); Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture(1995), for which she was awarded a Critic’s Choice Award and the Lawrence Wylie Award for French Cultural Studies; and The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune(1988). She has also translated several works from French, including Jacques Ranciere’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster and The ZAD and NoTAV: Territorial Struggles and the Making of a New Political Intelligence (Verso, 2018) by the Mauvaise Troupe Collective.

Gary Wilder is a Professor in the Ph.D. Programs of Anthropology and History, and Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (2015) and The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the World Wars (2005). He is co-editor of two books: The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present, with Jini Kim Watson (2018) and The Fernando Coronil Reader: The Struggle for the Life is the Matter, with Mariana Coronil, Laurent Dubois Paul Eiss, Edward Murphy, David Pedersen, and Julie Skurski, (forthcoming, 2019). He is currently completing a book entitled “Untimely History, Unhomely Times: On the Politics of Temporality and Solidarity” and working on a another about black radical humanism in the Atlantic world provisionally entitled “After the Revolution, or More Abundant Life.”

AESTHETICS: TOWARD A RADICAL HISTORY

Offered in collaboration with Incite Seminars (click here to register)

This seminar will explore some of the most vexing questions in the history of aesthetics: What is art? How does it relate to the ‘real’ world of politics and society? How has it developed and changed over time? It will examine some of the responses given to these questions by major thinkers like Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Susan Sontag and Jacques Rancière. This will lead to a broader interrogation into the very presuppositions that structure these types of questions, as well as their answers, thereby opening space for a tectonic shift in our understanding of aesthetics, its social roles, and its history.

In its broadest sense, this shift will lead from an understanding of aesthetics as having a more or less fixed nature to one in which it is radically historicized by being recognized as a dynamic social product of certain cultures. Examining the networks of production, circulation and reception operative in what is called art in the modern ‘Western’ world, with an eye to its variations across time, space and social strata, this course inspects how the European world has developed—and then attempted to universalize—a very unique concept and practice of aesthetics, which is bound up in various ways with colonial expansion and the capitalist exhibition of symbolic goods.

Facilitator: Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher, cultural critic and activist. He is the Founder and Director of the Critical Theory Workshop, as well as Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Counter-History of the Present, Radical History & the Politics of Art and Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics. In addition to his scholarly work, he has been actively engaged in extra-academic activities in the art and activist worlds, as well as a regular contributor to public cultural and political debate.

Reading: Gabriel Rockhill, Radical History & the Politics of Art
Recommended Film:  Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, Statues also Die