The moral turn in the human sciences has led to an increasing emphasis on the problem of evil. While the Holocaust is frequently presented as the paradigmatic case of evil, this problem has also been used to underscore the unredressed wrongs of slavery and genocide in the history of empire and colonialism. This course aims to take the problem of evil seriously while also raising a doubt about the certainty with which some scholars have characterized evil as a problem of willful or culpable wrongdoing. We aim to think the problem of evil alongside and through a related problem, namely how we come to understand one another as shared participants in a moral universe. This will lead us to consider a series of subsidiary questions: How do we understand one another when ethical stances strike us as unacceptable or, more emphatically, inhuman? Under what conditions do we characterize acts that seem to conform to rival systems of value as evil?  In other words, to what extent is the problem of evil a problem of understanding? And do our pronouncements about evil necessarily carry certain assumptions about transhistorical and transcultural human values? Our course resources include works by Ludwig Wittgenstein on the problem of human understanding, Hannah Arendt’s account of the problem of evil, and Stanley Cavell’s account of the problem of acknowledgement, as well as a number of film screenings.

What is the place of conversation in political thought? What makes such conversations generative or fulfilling? What role do conversations about politics play in connecting our present to the past and in helping us to reimagine our futures? These are some of the questions that this course hopes to explore by following along the threads of a conversation that has united the aims, hopes, and disappointments of three generations of anti-colonial thinkers in the Afro-Atlantic world. Taking the intellectual life of the Jamaican-British social theorist, Stuart Hall, as an exemplary site for this investigation, students will engage with a variety of sources—recordings, interview transcripts, memoirs, scholarship, and political writings—in an effort to piece together one strand of conversation out of which Hall’s intellectual life took shape and through which he in turn shaped the intellectual lives of others. Of particular interest here is the intergenerational character of these conversations. Students will be encouraged to explore how people are shaped by intergenerational preoccupations and concerns, even as they come to take up these preoccupations in new ways that often mark a break from the past. Together, we will also examine how, in narrating their own preoccupations and intellectual lives to themselves, people lay claim to particular pasts and sketch out hoped-for futures.

Utopia’s Eclipse? The Horizon of Political Hope in the Wake of Empire and Revolution

University of Chicago, Winter 2021, Winter 2022, Autumn 2024

PLSC 22205 / CCCT 22205 / CRES 23205 / LLSO 22205

The twentieth century was a time of extraordinary political hope associated with socialist and anti-colonial struggles that promised to usher in new forms of human freedom. However, by the 1980s, this hope had given way to catastrophe as the horizons of political possibility and revolutionary aspiration characterizing these struggles collapsed. How do we reckon with this collapse, and what does it mean to make a life for oneself in the wake of these failed emancipatory projects? 

This course seeks to explore this question by examining the place of utopian thinking, broadly understood, in the projects of anticolonial and socialist struggle in the twentieth century and by reading this strain of thought in light of the doubts that certain thinkers have raised about the possibility of attaining utopia’s promise. Taking as a starting point the idea that utopian thinking—at least in its modern, universalistic form—has always existed in a complex relationship to the figure of the “savage Other” and the project of Western imperialism, the first half of the course will invite students to test this claim against the aspirations advanced by certain anti-colonial and left revolutionaries. In the second half of the course, we will turn to contemporary debates about the possibilities of renewed utopian thinking in the present. In particular, we will examine some important recent reflections on the postcolonial predicament to consider what we might learn from the revolutionary failures of the twentieth century and what critical resources this history has yielded to us.