Post-Post-Structuralism: Resilience, Resistance, and the Return of the First Person Singular

What—dare we ask who?—comes after the “death of the subject”? The need for more robust human rights and environmental justice theories and practices demonstrates the need for a footing in something other than the post-structuralist, post-Enlightenment rejection of universals and the categorical proclamation of the death of the subject.

Anthropologist João Biehl contends: “What is outside biopower? Traversing worlds of risk and scarcity, constrained without being totally over-determined, people create small and fleeting spaces, through and beyond classifications and apparatuses of governance and control, in which to perform a kind of life bricolage with the limited choices and materials at hand (including being the subjects of rights and pharmaceutical treatments made available by state and non-state actors).” Biehl’s prize-winning Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, is a study about a poet’s creativity—an “outsider artist”—emerging from a zone of abandonment and abjection. It counters facile theoretical classifications of such existence as “bare life” (Agamben): “Whether in social abandonment, addiction, or homelessness, life that no longer has any value for society is hardly synonymous with a life that no longer has any value for the person living it.”

Biehl’s work attests to what Michel de Certeau had earlier identified as the stubborn resilience and creativity of everyday practice, the arts of “making do” against the grain of the grid of modern discipline. This course examines emerging contemporary efforts toward the positive recovery of the generative possibilities of life and distributed agency without relapsing into a naïve existentialist heroic individualism on the one hand, or the determinism of impersonal structures on the other. To realistically accept what is given is not to legitimize it, but instead to engage it with critique and to enact satisfying microtopias rather than projecting utopias. The concept of “post-post-structuralism” is offered not as a unified theory, but rather as an aggregate of parallel attempts to overcome the disabling generalizations embedded in poststructuralist theorizing.

Breaking with the postmodern concept of subjectivity, contemporary phenomenology (Alfonso Lingis) offers one avenue of recuperating the force of the “first person singular” that is evident in individual experience, affect and ethical commitment. To overcome the sterile polarities (“nature”—“culture”) of the recent culture wars, sociologist of science Bruno Latour rethinks the dynamic networks operative between agents (both human and non-human) and our environment. Philosopher Jean-Luc Marion proposes what might be the most compelling answer to who comes after the “subject” in his analysis of “the given”—she to whom phenomena must be given if there are to be phenomena at all.

We will test our ideas in close readings of contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction that depicts survival, resilience and resistance after the destruction of mankind and all modern disciplinary regimes.

Required books will include:
Alfonso Lingis, The First Person Singular
João Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
Catherine Belsey, Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction
Margaret Atwood, Oryx &Crake
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Further shorter readings by: Bruno Latour; Jean-Luc Marion; Peter Sloterdijk; Nigel Thrift; Isabelle Stengers; Deleuze/Guattari; Pheng Cheah

Written Assignments: mock review of journal article and 15-page research paper