Theory & Practice Archives - Page 3 of 12

Feature

Queers, Zombies, and Institutions

A Review of Lorenzo Bernini’s Queer Apocalypses: Elements of Antisocial Theory

November 21, 2017 • by Aaron Neber

Edelman’s words, published in 2004, may seem an already antiquated sentiment: (many) queers can now marry and fight in American wars; the Pope has ordered Christians to atone for the marginalization of LGBT people; and queer theory is fully lodged in American academia, making its charge for revolution resound less ...

Feature

Rousseau and Critical Theory

An excerpt from Alessandro Ferrara’s latest book

November 8, 2017 • by Alessandro Ferrara

Among the modern philosophers who have shaped the world we inhabit, Rousseau is the one to whom we owe the idea that identity can be a source of normativity (moral and political) and that an identity's potential for playing such a role rests on its capacity for being authentic. The idea ...

Feature

Adorno’s Freud in the Age of Trump

Part 1

October 2, 2017 • by Vladimir Pinheiro Safatle

Let us recall Freud's fundamental thesis in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In this text, Freud presents a general proposition about the process of constitution of collective identities. It is enunciated as follows: "such a primary mass is an amount (Anzahl) of individuals who have placed a single ...

Feature

Adventures of a Postmodern Historian

An excerpt from the new book

September 29, 2017 • by Robert Rosenstone

Eight years after the end my Fulbright, at the beginning of April 1983, I return to Japan for ten weeks in an effort to connect to the world of the nineteenth century, return in an attempt to share experiences and feelings buried in the past -- theirs and my own. How ...

Feature

Why Does a Historian Write a Memoir?

The adventures of a postmodern historian

September 27, 2017 • by Robert Rosenstone

Aurell shows that professional historians have produced some 450 works of autobiography or memoir, the bulk of them in the last few decades. "It is possible," he suggests, "that no other academic discipline can boast of such a high number of autobiographies written by its professionals." Perhaps, then, my work ...

Feature

Being an Activist, Having Privilege

Thoughts from inside the university

September 25, 2017 • by Liz Scheer

On the one hand, this line of thinking makes a great deal of sense to me. "The conversation" will never be "about me" (my own privilege will figure prominently in this essay), nor those like me, since we will never know what it is like to move through an anti-Black ...

Feature

Peter Berger’s Last Visit to The New School for Social Research

Revisiting The Social Construction of Reality

July 1, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Although circumstances did not permit Peter Berger to attend in person The New School’s conference commemorating the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Social Construction of Reality, it was wonderful to have him with us via Skype (nicely captured with me in the accompanying surreal photo). ...

Peter Berger’s Last Visit to The New School for Social Research

Theory & Practice

After Capitalism, the Derivative

For Randy Martin

April 9, 2017 • by McKenzie Wark

We forget that Marx’s Capital starts with the appearance of what is new in the world of its time: the abundance of commodities. So why always keep starting with commodities now that they are old, rather than starting with a form of exchange whose abundance is relatively new, with derivatives? ...

Education

Durkheim’s Enduring Relevance

Sociology offers a solution to the problems raised by Critical Theory

February 7, 2017 • by Nicola Marcucci

Émile Durkheim and the Durkheimian school also allow us to rethink the tension between the modern social sciences, and morality and politics. However, Durkheim’s analysis of this tension is, in some respects, divergent from the one put forward by Critical Theory. Sociology, according to Durkheim, is neither about supplementing the ...

Feature

Paris Terror Events and the Dramaturgies of the Aftermath

January 10, 2017 • by Public Seminar

Daniel Dayan is a fellow of the Marcel Mauss Institute (School of Advanced Study in the Social Sciences) and a professor at the Levinas European Institute. Dayan has been Research director at CNRS-Paris, and a visiting professor at Sciences-Po and the universities of Stanford, Geneva, Tel Aviv, and Oslo. He has also been an Annenberg scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and for many years a ...

Reviews

What Can Cinema Teach Philosophy?

Badiou and Rancière on Film

December 19, 2016 • by Emmanuel Alloa

Philosophy’s general distrust of cinema is a thing of the past. Cinema no longer serves only as a placeholder for reproving wrong conceptions of time (Bergson on the “cinematographic illusion”), as the incarnation of the distraction industry (Adorno), as a symptom of cultural depravation (Heidegger on the remove from “Japanese ...

Feature

The Armenian Violence Question

A Conversation on Means and Social Change

December 13, 2016 • by Tamar Shirinian and Nelli Sargsyan

How do we make sense of a general population's acceptance of militarization? We see the following conversation as an attempt to entangle and disentangle some of the complexities of this particular historical juncture in post-Soviet Armenia. In reflecting on the Armenian experience and on the larger process of postsocialism and ...