CLASS FULL!

Mondays, 8:30-10:30pm
6 March – 24 April 2006

This 8-week reading group is a component of an (indeterminate) event TSCI is planning for summer 2006, called “Entangled Territories.” Our conversations will inform the design of Entangled Territories, though we by no means wish to confine our conversations to that purpose.

The proposed reading list is a brief survey of the thought of a handful of poststructuralist philosophers and autonomist theorists. TSCI proposes to approach these readings with a sort of conceptual pragmatism. After opening our conversations by exploring the question, ‘what is a concept?’, we will encounter, map, and question a number of conceptual tools, like joyful passions, constituent power, becoming, autonomy, exodus, biopolitics, biopower, event…

Participants probably have varying levels of familiarity with the texts we’ll be reading. We strive to facilitate a space of mutual respect and reciprocal learning, bearing in mind the (thankfully) different backgrounds that we will each bring to this experiment in collective reading.

Reading List

• Bifo. “What is the Meaning of Autonomy Today?” In Republicart.
• Deleuze and Guattari. “Introduction: The Question Then…” and “What is a Concept?” In What is Philosophy?
• Deleuze. “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” “On Philosophy,” “Control and Becoming.” In Negotiations.
• Foucault. “So is it Important to Think?” In Essential Works of Michel Foucault: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth.
• Hardt. “Spinozan Practice: Affirmation and Joy (Speculation, Ontological Expression, Power, Practice)” In Deleuze:An Apprenticeship in Philosophy.
• Lazzarato. “From Biopower to Biopolitics.” In Pli.
• Lazzarato. “Struggle, Event, Media.”
• Negri and Guattari. “The Revolution Began in ’68.” Communists Like Us.
• Thoburn. “Introduction: The Grandeur of Marx.” In Deleuze, Marx, and Politics.
• Virno. “Ten Theses on the Multitude and Post-Fordist Capitalism.” In Grammar of the Multitude.