Upcoming courses at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Love is a perennial philosophical problem. From Plato’s Symposium to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, philosophers and political thinkers have recurrently asked: what is love? From where does it come, what does it do, and what does it demand? For Hannah Arendt, romantic love was apolitical because it turned us away from the world. In Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno argues that love is the one thing in a consumer society that we consider fated and not a matter of choice. Jean-Jacques Rousseau drew a distinction between amor de soi (a kind of egotism) and amour propre (a kind of self-esteem) in order to think about inequality in civil society. Erich Fromm saw love as an art form, while Herbert Marcuse thought polymorphously perverse love was a means to resistance under capitalism. How can we think about love philosophically, and what, if anything, is its real or potential political significance?
In this course, we will examine the personal, social, and political dimensions of love. Looking at the writings and letters of Plato, Augustine, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rosa Luxemburg, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, James Baldwin, and Hannah Arendt among others, we will ask: What are the different forms of love? What does love have to do with political life? Can love inform political solidarity? What are the differences between individual and collective love? Can love be utilized as a mode of resistance within capitalist society? Does love belong in the public realm? How has our understanding of love changed in the era of digital media?
From Hegel to Deleuze, many political thinkers have employed the language of dominance and submission within the tradition of Western political thought. How does the language of Sado-masochism shape the way we think about desire and political recognition?
This course will look at how the erotic language of S&M is embedded in the theoretical frameworks we use to approach questions of knowledge, pleasure, and power. Beginning with Hegel’s famous master-slave dialectic, we will explore how the frameworks of S&M shape approaches to questions of recognition, desire, subject and object. Among other questions, we will ask: Can we read sadism apart from masochism in order to rethink political forms of recognition? Is desire productive? How does the act of desire shape our engagement with the other? How do power relationships inform our discussions of political recognition? And how do the narratives of S&M shape the way we think the subject/object relationship within critical theory?
In addition to reading Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondsman” and Bataille’s engagement of Hegel in “Madam Edwarda” and Story of the Eye, we will look at the way sado-masochism frames our discussion of knowledge and power in works by Lacan, the Marquis de Sade, and Adorno and Horkheimer. In the second half of the course, we will consider how the merger of sado-masochism changes the way we think about liberal subjectivity in readings from Freud, Brown, Masoch, and Deleuze. We will conclude the course with readings from Sontag and Fromm in order to consider the role of fetishism in fascist aesthetics.