Course Requirements: Student Presentations and 2 assignments

This course is designed to think the mutually constitutive interstices of Capital-Community-Subjectivity. In the process, it takes critical stock of the three concepts in question – ‘capital’, ‘community’ and ‘subjectivity’. It problematises some of the given renditions of ‘capital’ and ‘community’ and works its way through some of the more nuanced understandings of the two to arrive at the ‘subject’; at understandings of subjectivities in general and at the psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity in particular.

Session 1:The Concept of Capital and the other Marxs

Outline of the particular structure of the course; the reason for setting up an engagement with three concepts at one and the same time – 'capital, 'community' and the 'subject'; why one needs to look at the relation among the three, particularly in a Southern and 'third world' setting; how all three come to constitute a Developmentalist worldview. Of the three concepts the course engages with we begin with the concept of 'capital'. Session 1 looks at other Marxs; other than the ones hitherto hegemonic among Marxists

Marx, K. 1993. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy trans. Martin Nicolaus, pp. 81-111. London and New York: Penguin Books. Link found here

Marx, K. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy – Volume I, pp. 138-163. Penguin Books. Link found here

Session 2: Capitalo-centrism in Marxism and Marx’s others

Foucault, M. 1973. “The Measure of Labour” in The Order of Things, pp. 221-226. New York: Random House. Link found here

Chakrabarty, D. 2000. “Two histories of Capital” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, pp. 47-71. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Link found here

Gibson-Graham, J.K. 1996. “The Economy, Stupid! Industrial Policy Discourse and the Body Economic.” in The End of Capitalism (As we Knew It), Ch. 5. Oxford: Blackwell.Link found here.

...."Strategies" (page 1 - 23The End of Capitalism (As we Knew It), Oxford: Blackwell Link found here

Session 3: Development and Third Worldism: From Pre-Capital to Capital

Escobar, A. 1995. “Economics and the Space of Development: Tales of Growth and Capital.” in Encountering Development, pp. 3-17, 55-94. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Link found here

Chakrabarti, A and Cullenberg, S. 2003. Transition and Development in India, pp. 1-24, 197-200. New York and London: Routledge. Link1

Link2

Session 4: Development as Well-Being, Agency and Freedom / Development as a post-capitalist possibility

Crocker, D. 1992. “Functioning and Capability: The Foundations of Sen’s and Nussbaum’s Development Ethic” in Political Theory, Vol. 20, No. 4., pp. 584-612. Link found here

J. K. Gibson-Graham. “A diverse economy: rethinking economy and economic representation” and Jenny Cameron & J. K. Gibson-Graham “Feminizing the Economy: metaphors, strategies, politics, pp. 1-8, 3-20. LInk found here

Session 5: The Concept of ‘Community’ – Community as Capitals’s other.

Chatterjee, P. 1999. “Communities and the Nation” in The Partha Chatterjee Omnibus, pp. 220-239. New Delhi: OUP. Link found here

Chatterjee, P. 1986. “The Cunning of Reason” in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, pp. 167-171. New Delhi: OUP. Link found here

Session 6: Decentering Community – The Other Within

Freud, S. 1990 (1939 [1934-38]). Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays in The Origins of Religion, pp. 295-386. London: Penguin Books. Link found here

Session 7: Marking the ‘Being-in-common’

Nancy, J-L. 1991. The Inoperative Community, pp. 1-70. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Link found here

Agamben, G. 1993. The Coming Community, pp. 43-46, 62-64, 78-86. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Link found here

Session 8: The ‘Dark’ Community

Fanon, F. 1967. “The Negro and Psychopathology” in Black Skin, White Masks, pp. 141-209. New York: Grave Press .Link found here

Mmembe, A. 2001. “Time on the Move” in On the Postcolony, pp. 1-23. Berkeley: University of California Press. Link found here

Session 9: Disinterring the Idea(l) of ‘India’

Matilal, B. 2002. “India without Mystification: Comments on Nussbaum and Sen” in The Collected Essays of Bimal Krishna Matilal: Mind, Language and World ed. Jonardon Ganeri, pp. 386-414. New Delhi: Oxford University Link found here

Niranjana, T. 2006. Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad, pp. 1-15. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Link found here

Session 10: Post-fraternal/post-oedipal Possibilities of Being-in-common

Butler, J. 2000. Antigone’s Claim, pp. 1-25. New York: Columbia University Press. Link found here

Lear, J. 1998. “The Disappearing “We” ” in Open Minded: Working out the Logic of the Soul, pp. 80-122. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Link found here

Session 11: The Concept of the ‘Subject’

Calvino, I. 1983. “Reading a Wave” in Mr. Palomar, pp. 1-3 (Link found here ).

Kafka, F. 1916. Metamorphosis, pp. 11-52 (Link found here )

Nagel, T. 1974. “What is it like to be a Bat” in The Philosophical Review LXXXIII, 4, pp. 435-50 (Link found here )

Messer, S. B., Sass, L. A. and Woolfolk, R. L. 1990. “If Persons are Texts” in Hermeneutics and Psychological Theory: Interpretative Perspectives on Personality, Psychotherapy and Psychopathology, pp. 28-50. New Brunswick and London: Rutger’s University Press. Link found here

Session 12: Decentering the Subject

Visweswaran, K. 1996. “Refusing the Subject” in Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, pp. 60-72. New Delhi: OUP.Link found here

Haraway, D. 1997. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s” in The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory, ed. Steven Seidman, pp. 82-118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Link found here

Session 13: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Repression-Disavowal-Foreclosure

Freud, S. 1925. “A Note on the Mystic Writing Pad” in General Psychological Theory, Chapter XIII, pp. 207-212.Link found here

Lear, J. 1998. “Restlessness, Phantasy, and the Concept of Mind” in Open Minded: Working out the Logic of the Soul, pp. 80-122. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Link found here

Lacan, J. 2006. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” in Ecrits (trans. Bruce Fink), pp. 671-702 – New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company.Link found here

Session 14: Hegemony and the Subject

Butler, J. 1997. “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault.” In The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997, pp. 83-105.Link found here

Butler, J., Laclau, E., Zizek, S. 2000. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, pp. 11-43 – London and New York: Verso.Link found here