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Get students acquainted with new materialism and its uses for the humanities. Key texts will show how we are always in nature and how nature is necessarily cultured, how the mind is always material and how matter is necessarily something of the mind. As opposed to the transcendental and humanist traditions that continue to haunt the humanities and to stir debates within the discipline, the course offers materialist perspectives that travel the fluxes of matter/mind, body/soul, nature/culture.
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This course starts from the observation that contemporary cultural theory no longer privileges the side of culture (but focuses on what Donna Haraway has called ‘naturecultures’) and explores both the materiality of products of the mind and of the mind itself. This so-called ‘new materialism’ cuts across several fields included in the humanities. In other words, fields as diverse as media studies and gender studies, Continental philosophy and Analytical philosophy add to the generation of what some scholars would call a paradigm shift in the humanities. In addition, the new materialism allows for a close cooperation of the humanities and the natural sciences. So-called new materialists work on the intersection of humanities and neurophysiology, physics, geology, but also fields such as psychology.
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