COL5131H NON DISCLOSURE ACTS
Time: Spring term, Wednesdays, 1-3
Sexual predators purchase secrecy from their victims, billionaires hide obscene wealth in off-shore bank accounts, government spies conduct counter intelligence under false identities–so many dirty truths are managed today by what we might call “non disclosure agreements.” But the double negative contained in the category of the “non disclosure” figures a limit to these agreements and opens up to the most pressing aesthetic, philosophical, and political questions regarding what constitutes truth, justice, and representation. And then there is the act. Whereas the “action” and the “agreement” function to reproduce the existing order, the act creates the conditions for something radically different to come into the world. In this seminar, we will focus on the promise of the non disclosure act as a way to question such key modern binaries as public-private, exposure-concealment, knowable-unknowable, conscious-unconscious, presence-absence, representation-presentation, and theory-practice. We will study encounters with the problem of disclosure by such thinkers as Badiou (truth procedures), Barad (quantum entanglement), Butler (performativity), Derrida (deconstruction), Heidegger (unconcealment), Jameson (representation) Karatani (transcritique), Lacan (the real), Marx (ideology critique), Nishida (praxis), and Zizek (the parallax). We will also study artistic experiments of the non disclosure act, ranging from film, video, and literature to performance art, dance, architecture, and new media.
EAS 243 H Japanese Cinemas 2 (Fall)
VIC Praxis and Performance (Fall)
EAS Body, Movement Japan (Spring)