Notes for 5 January 2016

LITCS 114
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Bldg. 494, room 160B
Winter 2016

• Introductions!
  • I'm Patrick. Who are you?
  • There's a syllabus!
  • Also some assignments!
    • Like this blogging assignment!
    • Also, there is a presentation assignment! (Though it will not be posted until late tonight.)
• So what are we talking about this quarter?
  • What is biopolitics?
    • First: What do you take the word to mean? Come on, guess.
    • Well, we'll be reading Lemke on this for Thursday. Some brief perspectives, for now ...
      • Biopolitics responds to [a] transgression of boundaries[:] It reacts to the fact that the boundary conditions of human life, which until now were unquestioned becasue they lay beyond the reach of our technical capabilities, are becoming accessible to us. (Wolfgang van den Daele, qtd. on Lemke 27)
      • Read aloud: Foucault 135–37.
      • Agamben: National Socialist biopolitics—and along with it, a good part of modern politics even outside the Third Reich—cannot be grasped if it is not understood as necessarily implying the disappearance of the difference between the two terms: the police now becomes politics, and the care of life coincides with the fight against the enemy. (Homo Sacer 147)
      • Esposito: Modernity is the place more than the time of this transition and turning [svolta]. By this I mean that while, for a long period of time, the relation between politics and life is posed indirectly—which is to say mediated by a series of categories that are capable of distilling or facilitating it as a sort of clearinghouse—beginning at a certain point these partitions are broken and life enters directly into the mechanisms and dispositifs of governing human beings. (Bíos 28)
• So, this class is...
  • ... a course that takes seriously CCS's self-representation as a graduate school for undergraduates:
    • It emphasizes theory.
      • Some words about theory:
        • Theory is a genre.
        • Theory is a way of digging down into the but how do you really know? questions.
        • Theory aims to expose deep structures to visibility, critique, and change.
        • Fostering a resistance to theory is a way of fostering a blindness to structures and of preventing critique and change.
        • Theory can be difficult. Sometimes, this is simply the effect of asking you to see things in a very new way. This can also be a conscious strategy on the part of a theoretician.
    • it expects you do be self-directed and to monitor your own progress, as well as to ask for help when you need it.
    • it expects that you will read deeply, intelligently, and on time, and bring questions to class.
    • it expects that you will be passionate about and engaged with the material, or that you can perform as if you were.
  • ... a course in the way that women's bodies are understood, represented, and fought over, especially in the 20th and early 21st centuries, especially in the U.S.
  • ... both timely and important (I hope).
• So, this class is not...
  • ... a class that is dead-center focused on mainstream feminist theory.
    • This statement is not intended to disparage feminist theory, which is important and substantial and relevant. It's just not the primary theoretical focus of this particular class.
    • However, you may find that mainstream feminist theory is highly resonant with many of the things we'll be talking about here, and I always welcome you to articulate readings and viewpoints that are theoretically informed in this particular way.
  • ... a class that is dead-center focused on orthodox biopolitical concerns.
    • We're going to be partially displacing race in favor of gender here.
    • Again, this is not part of a claim that race is not an important theoretical or analytic category—just that this is a gender-focused class.
  • ... easy. Though I think it will be very worthwhile.