Political Science 256 - Fiction, Flare, Flash

As poetry, photos, memes, tunes, performances, and news go viral on digital platforms like Twitter and YouTube, and on personal blogs, the question arises as to what kind of high-speed (or slow) politics they enact. Fast fiction, in short, enables flare politics and calls for flash philosophy—a kind of philosophical thought that critically reflects on temporality and its links to modern, colonial, gendered constellations of power. Scrutinizing speedy productions in multiple media, investigating aphoristic or fragmentary genres of philosophy in work by Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, Anzaldúa, and Moten, and examining approaches to temporal disjunction, e.g. by Nelly Richard and Elizabeth Grosz, this course asks what a philosophical language looks like that reaches across art, the everyday, and political life, and engages our historically and politically fashioned senses and imaginings. Students will submit weekly flash-postings.

Fall semester. Karl Loewenstein Fellow Roelofs.