Fashioning Critical Theory

A discussion of Sylvia Wynter's essay "Toward the Sociogenic Principle" and Aníbal Quijano's "Coloniality of Power" essay, with particular attention to how each diagnoses the pathologies of the colonial relation, the world is buoys, and the kinds of racial and national identities it produces. How can we think outside the coloniality of power? How can the social be constructed otherwise, such that it produces liberated forms of subjectivity, knowledge, and being?

A conversation about Édouard Glissant's work on creolization, with particular emphasis on how that conceptualization of relation emphasizes both the right to opacity and the necessity of cultural contact. What happens to concepts, to art, to expressive life when it is put in contact with differences? How do vulnerable communities and traditions protect themselves in moments of asymmetrical contact? And so what are the ethics of these kinds of encounter?

A discussion of Paul Celan's essay "The Meridian," along with companion pieces of Emmanuel Levinas. Claude Lanzmann, and Jacques Derrida, with particular focus on the poetic word's capacity to bring the deconstructive, dismantling, and interruptive function of absence in reckoning with traumatic experience. How does such a word reflect an ethics of speaking about catastrophe?

A discussion of Hortense Spillers' essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," with particular emphasis on the critical possibilities opened up by her interrogation of naming, gender, and race after The Moynihan Report. What does the Report tell us about the status of the phrase "Black woman"? And what remains to be thought after what that Report erases from our conceptual approach to the world?

Long discussion of Julia Kristeva's The Powers of Horror, with special attention to how her theory of abjection informs political strategies of oppression and exploitation rooted in the body. Our discussion works through the conception of the abject and its relation to misogyny and patriarchal cultural formation and reproduction, with particular attention to the aging feminine body, the "formless" and "plump" girl body (Nabokov's words and example), and how abjection sits at the center of our cultural-political imagination.

A discussion of Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?," an essay that interrogates the discursive conditions of speaking and the coloniality of such conditions. We focus here on silence, withdrawal, and the refusal to enter into discourse as a form of resistance and ethics. In particular, we are here interested in why Spivak makes this claim - what is protected, what is kept from colonial view - and what are its implications for thinking about gaps and silences in the archive of subaltern history and lives.

A lively unpacking of deconstructive practice and how texts conceal disrupting supplements. Conversations trace Derrida’s ties to Algeria and May 1968 to explain anti‑purity thinking. Close readings of Rousseau, Husserl, and Levinas reveal how origins are destabilized. The talk links deconstruction to democratic, anti‑authoritarian values and the ethical value of humility.

A discussion of a cluster of Toni Morrison's non-fiction pieces concerned with gender, memory, and the imagination. We explore the relation between Morrison's meditations and our previous conversations about place and memory, in particular how transcendence is brought to sites through memory-work and the imagination. As well, the ways in which memory-work and the imagination entwine with landscape, meaning, and the ethics of reading emerge as both conceptually interesting and innovative and as imperatives placed on us by Morrison's deep work on the meaning of literature and literary production. How does that deep work make us different kinds of readers? How does it animate literature and our imaginations when we engage the text?

This podcast is bookended by musical pieces by Arthur Cooper, Malaco Records recording artist and great grandfather of participant and University of Maryland doctoral student Timmy R. Bridgeman.A conversation about Albert Murray's The Hero and the Blues and two essays by Ralph Ellison, "Living with Music" and "Blues People." In this discussion, we explore the relation between Murray's and Ellison's development of blues as a form of thought, life, and expressive culture and ideas of tradition. With particular emphasis on and extension of blues and jazz as "idea emotions" (Ellison), we link their work to ideas of tradition, orality, invention, selfhood, and the relation between the bold or strong musician and their predecessors - articulating a relation of working with rather than, as with Harold Bloom, a parricidal impulse in relation to precursors. We also explore how blues, jazz, and the African American intellectual tradition reconfigures transcendence and ecstasy to locate intellectual-tradition work inside the body and inside the club, akin to the vision of poetry developed by Barbara Christian, which renders a very different sense of memory, history, and world than we find in the pessimistic work of Martin Heidegger.Participants: Katelin Ten, John E. Drabinski, Shannon Neal, and Timmy R. Bridgeman.

A process piece reflecting on our discussion of two essays by Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1936) and "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" (1951), with particular emphasis on how he rethinks the object of art and our sense of place. Heidegger's essays attend to the experience of alienation from what he calls "the fourfold," our relation to our own mortality, to the earth, to the sky, and to the divine. A key element in this, I claim, is the question of tradition. How has a sense of "the West" or "Europe" as an intellectual and human tradition been modified by the worst/essence of modernity? And what possibilities remain for thinking about being in modernity yet also outside modernity? And, most importantly, how do Heidegger's ideas travel from reflections on a Greek temple (the putative origin and foundation of European identity) to other sites of gathering of the divine, of memory, of moments of origin or transformation?