Karl Marx — Capital, Volume 1

Non-Credit Seminar led by Prof. Nathan Brown
Winter 2025, Thursdays 4-6pm, January 16 - April 10
Concordia University, LB 646, in person
contact: nathan.brown11@gmail.com

First published in 1867, Marx’s Das Kapital is the definitive analysis of the capitalist mode of production. Marx uncovers the form of value latent in production, exchange, and accumulation. He traces the development of the capitalist system from its origins through contradictions inherent to its structure, through transformations of the labor process compensating for those contradictions, and toward the declining rate of profit they portend. He offers a theoretical framework for understanding technological development in modernity, for grasping economic and political determinations of colonialism, and for understanding the basis of capitalist exploitation. Above all, Capital is a theory of social and economic relations structured by class, and therefore of the structural determinations of class struggle in modernity.

In this seminar we will read Volume 1 in the new translation of the Second German Edition (1872) by Paul Reitter, published by Princeton University Press (2024). Each session will begin with an introduction by Professor Brown, followed by questions and discussion.

Participants should acquire the edition of Seminar XI translated by Alan Sheridan (Norton 1998). Other texts will be made available online.

Reading The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

Non-Credit seminar led by Haider Ali, McGill University
Fall 2024, Thursday 4.00-6.00pm (begins September 5)
LB 681, in person
To enroll, contact nathan.brown11@gmail.com

Jacques Lacan is, in many ways, the most significant figure in psychoanalysis after Sigmund Freud himself, supplementing the discipline with structural linguistics, while also drawing upon various philosophical currents, like phenomenology. Lacan’s influence can be traced in much of French post-war anti-humanist thought, for instance in the work of Louis Althusser. Indeed, the students of Lacan and Althusser (Badiou, Duroux, Miller, to name some) would go on to produce novel theoretical interventions, such as in the Cahiers pour l’Analyse. Despite his significance, Lacan is famously difficult to work with, due to his abstruse style and technical terminology. This seminar offers an introduction to Lacan’s thought, by reading Lacan’s first seminar delivered to a non-specialised audience: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. In this seminar, Lacan, for the first time, presents a more cohesive view of his psychoanalytic system, tracing ‘four’ fundamental concepts, as the title implies: the unconscious, repetition, transference, and the drive.

Weekly sessions, which include a framing lecture followed by discussion, will follow Lacan’s fundamentals, with a mind to clarifying Lacan’s theory of the ‘subject’. We will begin with some contextual material selected from Freud and from Lacan’s Écrits, before devoting the remainder of the seminar to The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. No prior experience with the subject matter is necessary or expected.

Participants should acquire print copies of the Penguin Classics editions of Hölderlin’s Selected Poems and Fragments and his Essays and Letters.

Friedrich Hölderlin, Poetry and Prose

Non-Credit Seminar, led by PhD Candidate Marlene Oeffinger
Winter 2024, Tuesdays 4-6pm (begins Jan. 16)
LB 681, in person
To enroll, contact oeffinm@gmail.com

*This seminar is open to anyone who wants to participate in person, with regular attendance and diligent reading. (If space is an issue, priority will be given to Concordia students).
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The work of Friedrich Hölderlin is central to both early German Romanticism and the development of German Idealism. This course will offer an opportunity to study a selection of Hölderlin’s Odes, Elegies, and Hymns, his philosophical novel Hyperion, and his mourning-play The Death of Empedocles along with essays, letters, and critical commentary.

Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments. Trans. Michael Hamburger. Penguin Modern Classics, 1998.

Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory. Trans. Jeremy. Adler & Charlie Louthe. Penguin Modern Classics, 2009.

Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece. Trans. Willard R. Trask, ed. Eric Santner, Continuum 1990; or Trans. Howard Gaskill, Open Book Classics 2019.

Friedrich Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles A Mourning-Play, Trans. David Farrell Krell. SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, 2008.

Suggested edition: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, 2019 reprint edition.
(This is the least expensive and most widely available edition. Other editions/translations may be used, but frequent page references in seminar will refer to this one, as does the pagination of the Reading Schedule).

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time

Open Seminar, Professor Nathan Brown
Winter 2023, Wednesdays 4-6pm
LB 681, in person

*This non-credit seminar is open to anyone who wants to participate (in person), with regular attendance and diligent reading. If space is an issue, priority will be given to Concordia students. Each session will begin with an introductory lecture, followed by discussion.

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time is not only a fundamental text of twentieth century philosophy, but also a major influence upon twentieth century literature, art, cinema, and theory. Returning philosophy to “the question of being,” Heidegger’s thinking of the relation between being and time opens onto a broad range of concepts and problems, including analyses of world, mood, tools, solitude, language, and death. His early work reoriented phenomenology, inspired French existentialism, and contributed to the rise of “theory” as a form of thinking persisting after the purported “end of philosophy.”

Meeting weekly, we will read Heidegger’s text with particular attention to its relation to Kant’s critical system and German idealism, working to grasp its key concepts as well as the history of philosophical problems that motivates it. No previous knowledge of the philosophical tradition is required.

The Poetics of the Untimely: From Negritude to the Haitian Revolution

Graduate Seminar, Professor Nathan Brown
Winter 2023, Mondays 6:00 to 8:15pm
Course Code: 668.4 AA

the poem is not a mill to
grind sugar cane certainly not
– Aimé Césaire, “Reply to Depestre Haitian Poet”

In Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal, Aimé Césaire refers to “Haiti where negritude rose for the first time,” and in his “Reply to Depestre Haitian Poet” he aligns a commitment to the poetics of free verse with “the mad chant of Boukman birthing your country,” referring to the Vodou oath at Bois Caïman which initiated the Haitian revolution. How exactly are we to understand this alignment of free verse and the politics of Negritude with the rupture inaugurated by the Haitian revolution, and with the role of Vodou within it? What are the implications of this relationship for understanding “romantic” and “modernist” orientations toward the politics of poetry and the poetry of politics? What are the implications of Césaire’s implicit claim to the revolutionary genesis of free verse—as an instance of retroactive, speculative, and poetic historiography—for our understanding of the relation between imagination and history?

Engaging with mid-century debates in Présence Africaine concerning decolonization, “national poetry,” and the politics of form, we will address these questions through readings of works by Aimé Césaire and René Depestre, historical and theoretical accounts of the Haitian Revolution, and writings on Vodou. Throughout, we will try to understand the dialectical entanglement of poetic form, historical rupture, and affirmations of Black power across modernity.

Alain Badiou’s Being and Event

Reading Seminar, Winter 2022

Fridays, 2PM - 4PM, via Zoom

(Organised by Nora Fulton)

The articulation of the Alain Badiou’s philosophical system began in earnest in 1988 with the publication of Being and Event, which Dominique Janicaud claimed was “the first book, since Being and Time, that again dares to ask the question ‘what of being qua being?’ and proffers an answer to it.” Being and Event represented a rupture within the philosophical discourses of its time, which since Heidegger had turned in various ways against the possibility of a fundamental ontology capable of grounding any kind of universal truth; the book also represented a massive shift in Badiou’s own thinking, which saw him renovate the various debts to Lacan and Althusser that had informed his earlier work in Theory of the Subject. Being and Event’s two central theses are these: first, that “being is a pure multiple,” and second, that “mathematics is ontology.” Over the course of thirty-seven meditations, Badiou develops a set-theoretical model based on these theses which allows him to theorize the Event as the only exception to the ordering of the multiple that ontology always is: only through this theorization can we locate the Subject and its militancy, and Truths, whether they pertain to politics, science, art or love, in their eternity. It is undeniable that the gauntlet Being and Event threw down is conditioning philosophical thought in the present, and with the recent completion of his system receiving its first English translation next year (2018’s Immanence of Truths, which follows 2006’s Logics of Worlds), there is no better time to return anew to the first frame of Badiou’s grand triptych.

This reading seminar will consist of a close engagement with Being and Event, and will acquaint participants with the discourses in which Badiou intervenes. A deep familiarity with mathematics, philosophy of mathematics, or symbolic logic is not required for this engagement, but part of our goal will be to supply a working knowledge of the ways that Badiou as a philosopher (and philosophy more generally) takes up mathematical production and thinking.

Required Text
G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard, Cambridge UP, 2018

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

Open Seminar, Professor Nathan Brown
Winter 2021, Fridays 4:00 - 6:00 pm (online)

Along with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is a foundational text of modern German philosophy. Moving beyond the formalism of Kant’s transcendental method, Hegel offers a genetic and historical account of perception, life, thought, and spirit. Hegel’s dialectical method is essential to understanding the development of Marx’s historical materialism, in the wake of which the Phenomenology remains a crucial text in debates concerning the relation between idealism and materialism, philosophy and history, structure and genesis, spirit and nature, thinking and being. 

This non-credit seminar will offer a step-by-step introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology. Our goal will be to grasp the conceptual and methodological developments of the text and to situate them in relation to intellectual and political history. The seminar is open to anyone but capped at 30 participants, with preference given to Concordia University graduate students.

Each session will begin with an introductory lecture followed by questions, leading to open discussion in the second hour. 

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
Reading Seminar, Winter 2020
Wednesdays, 1:00 - 3:00pm, LB 681
Beginning Jan. 8

*Note: "Reading Seminar" means that there is no formal enrollment or credit, nor any assignments for this course. Participants are responsible only for reading and discussing the text at weekly meetings over the course of one semester. Anyone is welcome to attend. We will refer to the Penguin edition (trans. Marcus Weigelt).

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787) is a foundational text of modern European philosophy. It is central to understanding the critical vocation of much contemporary theory, whether stemming from the Frankfurt School or from Derridean deconstruction. It is basic to understanding the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl, the existential phenomenology of Heidegger, or the transcendental empiricism of Deleuze. It is a pivotal point of reference for any debate concerning the categories of subject and object. It offers an epochal reframing of concepts of space and time, and Kant’s rethinking of the relation between philosophy and science undergirds many of the epistemological positions developed by contemporary science studies.

This course will provide an opportunity to study Kant’s first critique in depth. Our goal will be to grasp the structural and conceptual developments of the text while also seeking to understand their place in intellectual history and their importance to current philosophical and theoretical debates.

SCHEDULE
*Rather than proceeding in chronological order, we will first read two texts primarily concerned with theorizing aesthetic categories (Kant & Ngai) before turning to dialectical and deconstructive approaches to aesthetic problems raised by modernism (Adorno and Moten)

September 4, Introduction
September 11, Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment
September 18, Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment
September 25, Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment
October 2, Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories
October 9, Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories
October 16, Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories
October 23, Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
October 30, Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
November 6, Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
November 13, Moten, In the Break
November 20, Moten, In the Break
November 27, Moten, In the Break

Aesthetic Theory: Romantic, Modernist, Contemporary

Grad Seminar, Fall 2019, LB 668.2
Wednesday, 6:00 - 8:15pm

At the end of her 2012 study, Our Aesthetic Categories, Sianne Ngai remarks that “it is aesthetic theory that needs resuscitation in our contemporary moment, not the aesthetic as such.” Ngai’s point is that because the forms of sensation and affect we might call “aesthetic” have undergone a hyperbolic expansion in late capitalist culture, aesthetic theory requires new categories and modes of reflection to constitute an adequate critique of structures of feeling. We will approach this problem by studying key formulations of aesthetic theory traversing romantic, modernist, and contemporary cultural moments, focusing on four major texts.

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) inspired romantic aesthetic theory by according a central philosophical role to aesthetic reflection, by identifying beauty with the experience of singularity, and by developing a powerful new theory of the sublime. Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970) refashions Kantian critique from a historical materialist perspective, taking seriously the challenge of modernism to concepts of “art” and developing a dialectical theory of how the formal “autonomy” of the artwork is related to historical determinations. Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003) asks how blackness bears upon artistic production and reception, with particular attention to structures of temporality, improvisation and ensemble, sexuality and the disruption of origin. Focusing on supposedly “minor” aesthetic categories (cute, interesting, and zany), Sianne Ngai extends aesthetic theory beyond its traditional focus on the beautiful and the sublime, attending to the configuration and subsumption of subjective affects by contemporary capitalist culture.

Throughout the course, we will reflect upon the major concepts and categories the problem of “the aesthetic” brings into play: the distribution of universality, particularity, and singularity; the relation between sensation and cognition; the theoretical analysis of affects; the historical ground of finite experience; and the relationship between capitalism and race. Thus, while our focus will be on aesthetic theory, this course will also serve as an introduction to major problems in critical
theory more generally.

Place: A Deformation
Grad Seminar, Fall & Winter 2017-18
Mondays 6:00 - 8:15 pm, biweekly

A major tension in the development of modernist form is folded into the urban fabric of the capitalist lifeworld: a tension between the communist politics of suprematist and constructivist forms and the seamless integration of the geometrically similar International Style of architecture into capitalist city planning. Taking this tension as a starting point, we will consider its stakes through a case study of the cruciform Place Ville-Marie complex in downtown Montreal. This case study will involve two closely related phases: 1) We will investigate the social history of the development of Place Ville-Marie, the politics of its role within and impact on the city, and the relation of these questions to the architectural form of the complex. 2) Having considered the historical and formal characteristics of the building, we will pursue the possibility of subjecting it to poetic investigation and critique: of taking its formal parameters and historical context as a basis for poetic transformations.

During the second of these two phases, we will make use of the technological resources of the Centre for Expanded Poetics and affiliated labs in Fine Arts, pursuing historically informed and politically critical transformations of the building’s formal parameters through 3D printing, laser cutting, textiles, digital textuality, or risograph printing. Thus, part of our course will involve a workshop format, through which we will learn how to deploy such equipment toward a practice of “critical poetics.” This will also require us to look at related practices in contemporary poetry.

Final projects may take the form of critical essays, text based poetic works, or three dimensional art objects. Our goal is to work at the juncture of critical theory and poetic practice toward a creative relation to modernist history immersed in the politics of form. Students in both critical and creative streams of the MA or Ph.D. program will be encouraged to experiment with new approaches to theoretical reflection and poetic making. Projects will be presented and exhibited at the end of the winter semester.

READING SCHEDULE
Sept 5: Introduction
Sept 12: Chapter 1 (pp. 3-15)
Sept 19: Chapters 2 - 3 (pp. 16 - 43)
Sept 26: Chapters 4 - 5 (pp. 44 - 72)
Oct 3: Chapters 6 - 7 (pp. 73 - 101)
Oct 10: Chapters 8 - 9 (pp. 102 - 129)
Oct 17: Chapters 10 - 11 (pp. 130 - 157)
Oct 24: Chapters 12 - 13 (pp. 161 - 182)
Oct 31: Chapters 14 - 15 (pp. 183 - 205)
Nov 7: Chapters 16 - 17 (pp. 206 - 221)
Nov 14: Chapters 18 - 19 (pp. 222 - 244)
Nov. 21: Chapters 20 - 21 (247 - 270)
Nov. 28: Chapters 22 - 23 (271 - 294)
Dec 5: Chapter 24 - 25 (295 - 323) 

Lacan's Linguistic Theory of the Unconscious: An Introduction
Reading Seminar*, Fall 2017
Tuesday 6:30 - 8:30 pm, LB 681

*Note: "Reading Seminar" means that there is no formal enrollment or credit, nor any assignments for this course. Participants are responsible only for reading and discussing the text at weekly meetings over the course of one semester. No prior knowledge of Lacan is necessary. Students and faculty from any department or university are welcome. 

This seminar will offer an introduction to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory through a close reading of Book III of Lacan's Seminar, which offers perhaps the fullest exposition of his early teaching. Through a startlingly original theory of psychosis, Lacan teaches us how to grasp his distinction between registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real while emphasizing and situating the role of the signifier in the unconscious and in psychoanalytic practice.

Key points of interest will be the relation of Lacanian theory to Saussurian linguistics, Lacan's influential theory of metaphor and metonymy, and the question of how Lacan's attention to the structural articulation of signifiers might inform our reading practices. 

Our meetings will begin with an introduction to key concepts and then move to questions and group discussion.

Email: nathan.brown@concordia.ca to indicate your interest.
 

Blackness, Freedom, Free Verse
Grad Seminar, Winter 2017
Mondays 6:00-8:15pm

Analyzing the “complicity of slavery and freedom,” Saidiya Hartman asks: “is not the free will of the individual measured precisely through the exercise of constraint and autonomy determined by the capacity to participate in relations of exchange that only fetter and bind the subject?” The key terms of this complex question — freedom, measure, constraint — bear not only upon problems of social determination, but also upon problems of poetic form. Is it possible to link social determination and poetic form, as these pertain to Black history and aesthetics, through the sort of question Hartman asks?

Taking up the bearing of this question upon contemporary American poetry, this course will focus on the relation between Blackness, freedom, and free verse. We will read poetry by Claudia Rankine, Aimé Césaire, Dionne Brand, Jean Toomer, M. NorbeSe Philip, Nathaniel Mackey, C.S. Giscombe, Amiri Baraka, and Evie Shockley leading us into investigations of how the history and experience of racial ascription is at issue in discrepant forms of free verse lyric, open field poetry, and poetic cartography. Interspersed with these volumes, we will discuss theories of Black positionality, performativity, and aesthetics articulated by Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Frank Wilderson, and Neil Roberts.

The Structure of Capital
Reading Seminar, Winter 2016
Fridays 2-4pm

Meeting weekly, we will undertake a close reading of Marx's Capital, Vol. 1. 

Reading Schedule
1. Introduction: Synthetic Summary - January 8
2. Chapter 1-3 (pp. 125-178) - January 15
3. Chapters 4-6 (pp. 178-283) - January 22
4. Chapters 7-9 (pp. 283-340) - January 29
5. Chapter 10 (pp. 340-417) - February 5
6. Chapters 11-14 (pp. 417-492) - February 12
7. Chapter 15 (pp. 492-643) - March 4
8. Chapters 16-18 (pp. 643-675) - March 11
9. Week Off - March 18
10. Chapters 19-24 (pp. 675-762) - March 21
11. Chapters 25 (pp. 762-873) - March 25
12. Chapters 26-33 (pp. 873-943) - April 1
13. Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process of Production (pp. 943-1085) - April 8

Structure / Form
Grad Course, Winter 2016
Wednesday 3:30-5:45

How do we define the terms "structure" and "form"? How do we distinguish between these concepts, and how do they function differently in such fields as philosophy, literary criticism, architecture, art, and science? 

Beginning with these questions, we will study major concepts of structural and formal determination in Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Marx. We will then follow these concepts through several key texts on the dialectical constitution of artworks (Adorno), structural causality (Althusser, Miller, Macherey), and formal rupture in poetic language (Kristeva, Moten). We will then conclude with Reinhold Martin's analysis of ideologies of structure and form in corporate architecture, Kate Marshall's account of infrastructure as a narrative figure in American fiction, and Rosalind Kraus & Yves Alain-Bois' delineation of a "formless" trajectory in 20th century art, following Bataille's theory of the informe. 

Social Death and Black Positionality
Reading Seminar, Fall 2015
(Fri 2-4, LB 681)

Meeting every other week, we will discuss three major texts theorizing slavery and social death, focusing on the politics of anti-black racism and black positionality in the present. 

Reading Schedule
September 11
- Introductory Session

October 9 & 16
- Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (pp. 1-101; 174-208; 299-342)

Nov. 6 & 13
- Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in 19th Century America

Nov. 27 & Dec. 4
- Frank Wilderson / Saidiya Hartman Interview
- Frank Wilderson, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (pp. 1-91)