SS.490 Foucault & Critical Theory: Critique of Enlightenment more

Course Description
This course will prepare you to undertake your own study of the works of Michel Foucault and of Critical Theory. No one can expect to grasp the wide ranging significance of this work in only one semester, and so instead it will focus on shorter essays and interviews. Learned essays and aphorisms in the form of “philosophical fragments” were, after all, considered the special forms of Critical Theory. In this sense, “critical” and “critique” do not refer to opinion and the passing of judgment, but to the turning of ideology against itself so as to bring about the demystification of the existing order and perhaps to even further its collapse. The purpose of critique is to expose the social relations of power so that everything that is considered natural or “just the way the world is” can no longer be assured of general submission. This critique has its own context and comes, of course, precisely when the relations of power have taken on the form of the “totally administered society,” a society and a process of submission that increasingly makes such critiques ever more difficult and yet ever more important to undertake.