Producing Violence

This course will be a 'critical and clinical' study of the conception of violence, in the broadest sense of the phrase. We will trace this conception across related registers: the event of physical violence; conditions (material and immaterial) of that event; and the conception of violence as an abstract notion. Here the conception of violence is seen as the object of theory, memory, or experience. Violence should not be quarantined within categorical and disciplinary conventions of academia or common sense. For this reasons we will indulge a transdisciplinary approach to the conception of violence, drawing from philosophy, social and political theory, anthropology, sociology, literature, cinema, and history.