Introduction to Critical Theory: Politically Red

Exploiting the homonymic play between "red" and "read," this course considers the relations between political engagement and different forms of activist literacy. In what way are reading and writing a means of doing political work? Why is it that, in Reading Capital, Louis Althusser famously insists that "only since Marx have we had to begin to suspect what, in theory at least, reading and hence writing means"? Analyzing writings by, among others, Marx, Luxemburg, Benjamin, Du Bois, and Jameson, we will think of how sentences are inseparable from the possibility of mass formations, insurrectionary politics, and collective action.