ANTHR 6045 - The Task of Thinking

Fall or Spring. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

T. Doha.

This seminar will introduce multiple texts and approaches organized around the concept of thinking. It will involve careful and close reading of texts in phenomenology, critical theory, political-economy, psychoanalysis, subaltern studies, Black Studies, and anthropology. What is critique and is it necessarily secular? What does it mean to invert speculative thought in order to analyze the commodity-form? What is the relationship between thinking and time? What is embodied thinking? What is a hermeneutic of suspicion? Is all thought Black thought? How does desire and the unconscious shape our orientation in thinking? What are the political and epistemological consequences of fieldwork?