Sruti Chaganti

Course Requirements: class presentations + 1 written assignment

SESSION 1: Introduction

Giorgio Agamben, 'What is the Contemporary?', from What is Apparatus and Other Essays, Stanford University Press, 2009

Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris, New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Blackwell Publishing, 2005 (selections) 

Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Columbia University Press, 2000 (pp. 27-56)

SESSION 2: Appearance and recognition

Thomas L. Popejoy, Fingerprints and Blankness: "Personal Identification" and Proof of Appearance in Modern Sovereign Power and Political Thought, Doctoral Dissertation, John Hopkins University, 2001

Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition, Princeton University Press, 2003 (pp. 26-55)

Ranabir Samaddar, Emergence of the Political Subject, Sage Publications, 2010 (selections)

SESSION 3: Biopower/Biopolitics

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Pantheon Books, New York, 1978 (pp. 133-155)

Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in Graham Burchell and Colin Gordon (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, University of Chicago Press, 1991

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, 1995 (pp. 45-68)

SESSION 4: Between the ineffable and the intelligible

Instructor: Milind Wakankar

Plato, 'Phaedo', Trans. G. M. A. Grube, from John M. Cooper (ed.), Plato: Complete Works, Hackett Publishing Company, 1997

SESSION 5: 

Instructor: Milind Wakankar

Michel Foucault, 'The Subject and Power', Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer, 1982), pp. 777-795 

From: Paul Rabinow, ed., Michel Foucault: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 1: Ethics, Penguin Books, 1994

Subjectivity and Truth, On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress, The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as Practice of Freedom

SESSION 6:

Walter Benjamin, 'On the Concept of History', from Selected Writings: Volume 4 1938-1940, Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Others, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 

Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, Trans. Michael Hardt, University of Minnesota Press, 1993

Giorgio Agamben, 'The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin', from Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford University Press, 1999 

SESSION 7: Concluding Session

Jacques Ranciere, 'Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?', The South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3, Spring/Summer 2004

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WORKSHOP WITH RADHIKA SINGHA - October 4 - 8

With Radhika Singha, we will look at specific political (colonial and contemporary) practices of identification and verification, focusing specifically on questions of territoriality, identity and technology. We will examine the notion of a person capable of unique appearance and the extent to which the shifting lines between human/non-human bring this notion into crisis.

October 4

Radhika Singha, 'Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identification Practices in Early Colonial India', Studies in History 16 (2000), pp. 151-98

October 5

Radhika Singha, 'Passport, Ticket and India-rubber Stamp: The Problem of the Pauper Pilgrim in Colonial India c. 1882-1925', in H. Fischer-Tine and A. Tambe (eds), Spaces of Disorder: The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, Routledge, 2009

Nicholas Gane, 'Posthuman', Theory, Culture, Society, Volume 23 Numbers 2-3 March-May 2006

Lawrence Liang, '... And Nothing but the Truth, So Help me Science', SARAI Reader 2007: Frontiers, pp. 100-110 

David Lyon, 'Under My Skin: From Identification Papers to Body Surveillance', from Jane Caplan and John Torpey (eds), Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern  World, Princeton University Press, 2001

Thomas L. Popejoy, Fingerprints and Blankness: "Personal Identification" and Proof of Appearance in Modern Sovereign Power and Political Thought, Doctoral Dissertation, John Hopkins University, 2001 (Chapter 4: Identification, Privacy, Ligeance)

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