Power, Culture, Knowledge

"Truth isn't outside power, or lacking in power... [t]ruth is a thing of this world," wrote Michel Foucault in the mid 1970s. In this course we will read and examine Foucault's seminal works on knowledge and power, and the kinds of scholarship it has engendered at the intersections of history, art history, anthropology, political science and social theory. In addition to Foucault's major interlocutor, Edward Said, we will read Antonio Gramsci, Derrida and Walter Benjamin. We will end the semester with facing the challenge of historicizing our own political present through a number of contemporary thinkers. M