This course will survey post-WWII continental philosophy as well as western social and cultural theory. In particular we will focus on post-structuralist genealogies of western political modernity. Touching on Kant, Hegel, Marx and Freud, we will investigate the pervasive European narrative of modernity as the progressive overcoming of private and arbitrary violence within social life. We will then focus the majority of the quarter on various post-structuralist interrogations of this narrative and its near total capture of western social, cultural, and political epistemologies. Thinkers include: Derrida, Lacan, Agamben, Butler, Spivak, Eagleton, Benjamin and the Frankfurt School.