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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
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The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, established in 2011, offers liberal arts education and research opportunities to local communities while supporting young scholars. With a mission to engage various intellectual traditions, the institute aims to provide accessible education and foster active, engaged citizens.
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Kaja Silverman’s Male Subjectivity at the Margins
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
How is masculinity constructed, and what would it mean, sexually, culturally, and politically, to construct it differently? For art historian and theorist Kaja Silverman, “There is nothing ‘natural’ or innocent about sexuality.” Our subjective experience of gender and sexuality is deeply entwined with prevailing ideology, and for conventional male subjects, identity and power are bound up particularly with the symbol of the phallus. ...
The Peace Process: Conflict, Diplomacy, and Geopolitics
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
From the 1979 Camp David Accords to the Oslo “peace process” and the freshly inked Abraham Accords, the political history of the Middle East over the past 40 years has been shaped by multiple attempts to make peace between Israel, the Palestinians, and the surrounding Arab states. With negotiations taking place most often under American auspices—and sweetened by the prospect of security agreements and military equipment sales—”peacemaking”...
Power and Resistance: Social Movements in Theory
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Power and Resistance: Social Movements in Theory and Practice Social movements face countless challenges, both internal and external. History demonstrates that ordinary people can create significant change, yet in many cases, their aspirations for transformation go unrealized. Why do social movements sometimes succeed, and why do they sometimes fail? This course is the attempt to grapple with these basic questions. Proceeding historically...
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International Relations: a Critical Introduction
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
While international politics has been a topic of discourse since at least Thucydides, international relations, as a branch of study distinct from political theory, emerged in the late 19th century—just as the European nation-state was making itself felt as the dominant political actor on the world stage. While arguably no discipline evolves entirely independently of social and political power, IR, with its descriptive and prescriptive...
Carl Schmitt: Politics and Conflict
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
“The specific distinction to which political motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” With this claim, Carl Schmitt outlined one of the most incisive understandings of political thought in modern times, a theory of politics as something distinct from questions of morality (good or evil) or aesthetics (beauty and ugliness). In recent decades, there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of the Nazi jurist and political...
Liberalism and Justice: An Introduction to John Rawls
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
The legacy of American political philosopher John Rawls is deeply contested. His landmark A Theory of Justice, which draws on Kantian and social contract traditions to offer a thorough-going defense of liberalism, has been agenda-setting for political philosophy since its publication. For some, Rawls is the most important figure in Anglo-American political philosophy, the pre-eminent modern theorist of justice, equality, and democracy. For others,...
Bach: Music and Transcendence
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
For many listeners, Johann Sebastian Bach is the authoritative standard by which all other composers are judged. His music is often considered both timeless and universal. But Bach’s very preeminence makes it hard to see him clearly—to discern the human face behind the “face of classical music.” A musical prodigy, uncooperative employee, conscientious craftsman, international celebrity, and deep religious believer, Bach made music both of...
Pan-African Political Economy: Liberation & Sovereignty
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
In popular, political, and scholarly discourse, Africa is often regarded as being politically and economically unique—and uniquely pathological. Problems of war, poverty, corruption, and political repression are treated as if they’re essential to the continent’s collective personality. Fundamental to the imperial narrative of white supremacy, the notion of Africa’s endemic disfunction obscures both the ordinariness of African prosperity,...
William Morris: Art, Socialism, and Utopia
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
“Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things,” William Morris wrote, “the leading passion of my life has been, and is, a hatred of modern civilization.” For Morris, the Pre-Raphaelite artist, designer, poet, and socialist whose writings and work helped establish the Arts and Crafts movement, each passion fed the other. Morris was a dedicated environmentalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist, active in the Socialist League and a defender...
Literature and Psychoanalysis
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Literature has been fertile ground for psychoanalysis ever since Freud’s first musings. Psychoanalysis borrows rampantly from literary texts, be it Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Goethe’s Faust, or Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Simultaneously, literary critics have deployed psychoanalytic concepts and insights—about trauma, desire, ambivalence, and the unconscious—to interpret how anxiety, loss, hate, sex, love, race, and truth operate...
The Fiction of Finance: William Gaddis’ JR
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
William Gaddis’ JR tells the story of 11-year-old JR Vansant, a Long Island boy who, operating from a school phone booth, trades penny stocks in route to building a corporate empire, nearly toppling the global economy in the process. In documenting the rise of young JR and the fall of those around him—hapless artists, helpless teachers, and scheming local power brokers of all kinds—the novel indexes the anarchy and abstraction of financial...
Truth and Beauty: Kant’s Critical Aesthetics
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Aesthetics is central to Kant’s philosophical project. In judging a thing to be beautiful, Kant maintained, we bridge “the great gulf” between nature and human freedom, and prepare ourselves to “love something, even nature, without interest”—that is, to exercise moral judgment. Immensely influential in its time, the so-called “third Critique” inspired and gave energy to both German Idealism, which attempted to provide a rational...
African Theory in the Wake of Colonialism
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Absolute Discourse: African Theory in the Wake of Colonialism The consequences of European colonization linger well after the destruction of overt colonial rule. Perhaps most profoundly, colonization drew upon and extended a mode of thinking and speaking that, for Westerners and Africans alike, continues to shape and naturalize the very ways we think about Africa and Africans—perpetuating, among other things, notions of African inferiority, pathology,...
Myth, Punishment & the Rising Waters: Reading the Flood
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
The biblical story of the Flood permeates the popular imagination. The plot is certainly familiar— an entire world submerged in water, pairs of animals marching onto the ark, eventual redemption—but our ability to realize the power of this story is often hampered by assumptions about its history or its primitive character. Yet, far from a single localized myth, the story of the flood is central to a range of ancient cultures—from Mesopotamia...
Theories of Photography
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Theories of Photography: Representation, Communication, and Aesthetics The photographic image is seen as a means of communication, a recorder of events, a powerful form of surveillance, and a poignant tool for creative practice. In this course, we will consider—and occasionally undermine—such views by delving into a critical analysis of the photographic image and the key theoretical frames that influence our understanding of photography and...
Feminism and Islam
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
The historian Margot Badran once queried, “What’s in a name? What is Islamic feminism?” The anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod posed a different yet related question in her article, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?”—impugning American imperialist savior narratives supporting military intervention in the Middle East in the name of rescuing Muslim women. These two questions—of feminist possibilities from within and the hazards of “salvation”...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Soviet music is both one of the best-known chapters in 20th-century musical history, and one of the most opaque. Composers like Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev enjoyed a public prominence that few of their western contemporaries could dream of, lionized at home and abroad during their lifetimes and enthusiastically canonized after their deaths. Yet their music’s meaning, and even its basic legitimacy, remain subjects of fierce contention....
What is Analytic Philosophy?
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 247 West 37th St, New York, NY
In the early 20th century, a new generation of thinkers came to believe that European philosophy had reached a dead end. Reacting to what they held was the obfuscatory language and non-sensical direction of post-Kantian philosophy, Cambridge philosophers Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore set out to revolutionize philosophy through a fundamental rethinking of its methods and purposes. Their work, and its outgrowths in the philosophies of mathematics,...
State, Power, and Democratic Socialism
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
State, Power, and Democratic Socialism: an Introduction to Nicos Poulantzas “One thing is certain, socialism will be democratic or it will not be at all.” So wrote the Greek Marxist and theoretician Nicos Poulantzas, just a year before his untimely death. Poulantzas’s work, newly rediscovered by sections of the U.S. left, constitutes a highly original set of writings on the nature of political power in both liberal-democratic and authoritarian...
Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, & Sexual Difference
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Luce Irigaray: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Sexual Difference In the wake of the publication of her landmark book Speculum of the Other Woman, which contains a scathing critique of Freud’s writing on female sexuality, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan famously expelled Luce Irigaray from her position at the University of Paris Vincennes. What was so shocking about Irigaray’s writing? A philosopher, a linguist, and a psychoanalyst, Irigaray’s...
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