GOVT 4666

Sense and Citizenship: Aesthetics in Political Theory

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2014-2015.

In this seminar, we will inquire into how questions of sensation cross between literature, aesthetics and political theory. Drawing from writings in continental philosophy and phenomenology, the challenge of the class will be to inquire into how sensation in particular broadens notions of citizenship and politics. How do accounts of sensation in political theory reconceive citizenship? What are possible conceptual practices for unraveling normative, colonial, and authoritarian definitions of the political subject? What is the place of sensation in theories of relationality? Students will also be asked to critique the terms under which citizenship is constrained, defined, and regulated. In addition, the course will examine how accounts of sensation delineate traces and figures excluded from the rights conferred by organized polities. In order to account for those excluded from citizenship, the seminar will also consider the role of sight, touch, and imagination in the public realm or, as Hannah Arendt writes, "namely, the faculty of seeing things not only from one's own perspective but from that of all others who are present." Facing the challenge of Arendt's words, the course will reflect on the implications of critique, judgment, and phenomenology for democratic theory in general. Discussions may, for example, seek to uncouple the rhetoric of sovereignty and law from citizenship. Finally, we will ask what a study of sensation provides for redressing and/or accounting for dispossession. As students will be encouraged to integrate their research interests with course reading, topics may include questions of how philosophies of anarchism, civil disobedience, feminism, queer theory, and decolonization broaden ideas of citizenship and political ethics.

When Offered Fall.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: 15 students.

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