Rosi Braidotti Mini Seminar - "Non-human/In-human/Posthuman' - Seminar 1: "Posthumanism"

Department: Critical Theory at UCI

Date and Time: March 14, 2016 | 4:00 PM-6:00 PM

Event Location: Humanities Gateway 1030

Event Details

This seminar aims at outlining, exploring and assessing different traditions of thought about the non-human/inhuman/posthuman with special reference to theories of subjectivity, taking as a running thread the on-going discussion and negotiation with Humanism. The seminar has a critical edge but a distinctively affirmative character in that it spends less time on the criticism of existing humanist models than on the specific theoretical, methodological and political contributions made by critical theories themselves. From post-structuralist anti-humanism to non-Western neo-humanism, critical theory involves the redefinition of what it means to be human.

Based on my books Nomadic Subjects and Nomadic Feminist Theory (Columbia University Press, 2011) and The Posthuman (Polity Press, 2013), I will introduce deleuzian neo-materialism and spinozist monism as major building blocks of contemporary posthuman theory.

Reading material for "Seminar 1: Posthumanism" will include: 
  • Michel Foucault: “Man and his doubles” in: The Order of Things
  • Rosi Braidotti: Chapter 1: “Posthumanism” in: The Posthuman; "Contexts and generations" in: Nomadic Subjects
  • Irigaray, Luce (1994): “Equal to Whom?” in: Schor, Naomi and Weed, Elizabeth (ed.) Mazzola, Robert L. (trans.) The Essential Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 80.
  • Rosi Braidotti: Chapter 5: ‘Sexual difference as a nomadic political project’; Chapter 9: 'Discontinuous becomings' of Nomadic Subjects
  • Edward Said: [Chapter to be decided] in: Humanism and Democratic Criticism
Rosi Braidotti (B.A. Hons. Australian National University, 1978; PhD Université de Paris, Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1981; Senior Fulbright Scholar, 1994; Doctor Honoris Causae in Philosophy, University of Helsinki, 2007; Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion, 2005; Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2009) is Distinguished University Professor and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. She was the founding professor of Gender Studies in the Humanities at Utrecht (1988-2005) and the first scientific director of the Netherlands Research School of Women's Studies. In 2005–2006, she was the Leverhulme Trust, Visiting Professorship in the Law School of Birckbeck College, University of London. In 2001–2003, she held the Jean Monnet Visiting Chair at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European Institute in Florence. In 1994-1995 she was a fellow in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.