Course Description: This course will examine principal texts and interpretations of the major figures in continental thought on the concept of the body. The theories we will study and discuss encompass the most foundational, innovative, and influential thinking on the body in the modern, postmodern, and posthuman eras. The concept of the body itself has emerged as a crucial area of inquiry in various disciplines and its import for artists, architects, critics, and cultural historians is continuously growing. Throughout the course students will become critically engaged with the texts as they become familiar with the most relevant and critically rigorous theoretical strategies articulated today. Students will be encouraged to address the possible relevancy and application of the various theoretical frameworks within the purview of their own political, aesthetic, and critical positions. Writers considered include Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, George Bataille. Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guittari, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Judith Butler.
The theories we will study and discuss encompass the most foundational, innovative, and influential thinking on the body in the modern, postmodern, and posthuman eras.
Lectures
1. Continental Aesthetics, Critical Theory, and the Body
2. The Body and Idealism: German Aesthetics: Kant and Hegel
3. The Body Existenz: Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Levinas
4. The Body Existenz: Phenomenology and Existentialism: Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
5. The Ideological Body: The Frankfurt School: Lukács, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, Jameson
6. The Valency of the Body: Nietzsche and Heidegger Redux
7. Bodypolitics: Foucault, Knowledge, and Power: The Body, Biopower, and Biopolitics
8. The Unconscious Body: Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, Feminism, and Postfeminism(s)
9. Deconstruction and the Body
10. Constructed Bodies; Sex and Gender; Gender and Performance
11. Constructed Bodies; Power and the Body; the Question of Materiality
12. Contested Constructions: Prohibition and Production
13. Subversive Bodily Acts
14. The Body and Constitutional Matrices
15. The Body as the Flesh of Culture
16. The Posthuman Body
17. The Coded Body: Biomedia
18. The Ethics of the Postman Body
19. The Sovereign Body: Homo Sacer
20. Bodies Without Organs
21. The Prosthetic Body
22. The Body and Death: Necro-Politics
23. The Cartographic Body
24. The Body and the Posthuman Environment