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Spanish 232
About the End of the World:
Crises of Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Culture and Theory
Boylston 335
Thursday 3.00-5.45 PM

Prof. Mariano Siskind ([email protected])

Office: 327 Boylston, (617) 495-9371
Office hours: TBD

Cosmopolitanism has been an extremely useful master-concept to understand subjective

universalistic desires and material processes of global dislocation, disjuncture and displacement
(as well as fantasies of totality, transparent communication and interrelations, and fictions of
totality) but it can no longer account for our present cultural-political situation. Cosmopolitanism
does not seem a useful notion to interrogate today's global displacements and traumatic losses at
the center of an experience of generalized crisis, whose global implications we will call the end
of the world. The idea of end of the world refers to the sense of overwhelming political futility
that dominates the political, intellectual and artistic spheres today, but also to the collapse of the
world understood as the modern/modernist symbolic structure that supported humanist
discourses of universal emancipation through global connections, translations, interactions,
displacements and exchanges; the world as the symbolic realm where demands of justice,
emancipation and universal inclusion were meant to be actualized. Today, the displacement of
more than 67 millions refugees, migrants and forcibly displaced persons as a result of
environmental catastrophes, economic hardships, and small and large scale perpetual wars and
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terror in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Europe; the theatrical demolition of liberal
democratic governmentality in Trump's America and across the Western hemisphere; the crisis
or death of Europe as a project of political and cultural reorientation of the American global
hegemony; the painful intensification of the military, economic and symbolic violence the Israeli
state exerts over Palestinian people; and the radicalization of financial capital’s global
sovereignty since the “recovery” from the 2008 crisis and the subsequent concentration of wealth
and global socio-economic inequality―all these point to the radical dislocation of the structure
we used to call "world". But this course is not about the very real historical suffering and losses
of those whose bodies are wounded by the end of the world; it is rather about the traces of those
experience that we call art and literature; about some of the idiosyncratic ways in which those of
us who care about art and literature attend to these forms as symbolic sites in order to try and fail
to understand the end of the world; about our reaction to an experience of the end of the world
that is and is not our end of the world; and about what we (we professors, students, intellectuals,
writers, artists) can and can no longer do about the end of the world through art as mediation.
In order to work through these notions we read texts by Roberto Bolaño, Immanuel Kant,
Elizabeth Bishop, Yuri Herrera, Hannah Arendt, Homi Bhabha, Jason de León, Sayak Valencia,
Georges Didi-Huberman, Samanta Schweblin, Svetlana Boym, Pedro Erber, Jacques Ranciere,
Enzo Traverso, Sigmund Freud, César Aira, Sarah Brouillette, Judith Butler, Emilia Sauri,
Isabell Lorey, Mathias Nilges, Julia Kristeva, Walter Benjamin, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Hal Foster,
Ursula K. Heise, Bruno Latour; we think with the visual work by Bouchra Khalili, Francis Alÿs,
Subhankar Banerjee, Marco Poloni, Leila Alaoui and Daniel Castro García; and we analyze films
by Alejandro Brugués (Juan de los Muertos), Lars von Trier (Melancholia), Alfonso Cuarón
(Children of Men), and the Brazilian Netflix series 3%.

Language

This seminar will be conducted in English with a very flexible linguistic policy. We will help one
another translate our thoughts when we need to resort to our mother tongues. Every single text in the
syllabus. You can choose to read texts in whatever language you want, and we will contrast
translations in class.

Requirements

1) Read Roberto Bolaño’s short story “El ojo Silva” (Putas asesinas) / “Mauricio (‘The Eye’) Silva”
(Last evenings on earth) for the first class (9/6) (here in Spanish and here in English); and
Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One art” (find it here). We will do close readings in class.

2) This is a seminar. Informed, intense participation is indispensable. Indeed, it is mandatory, and

represents a significant part of the final grade.

3) Each student will be responsible for THREE presentation-type exercises: 1) Students will choose a
week and will identify a passage in a text or film, and conceptualize a relevant problem in that
passage (super briefly: no more than 5 minutes including the reading of the passage) as an
invitation for the entire seminar to discuss the aforementioned formal and/or cultural-political
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problem based on the selected passage. On the first week of the semester, students will choose the
class and texts/films during which they’re interested in leading a discussion; 2) during Week 8
(10/25) everyone in the seminar will read out loud one passage from Bolaño’s 2666 and will be
ready to propose an interpretation; and 3) On December 6 we will hold a special meeting where
each student will circulate an abstract of their final conference paper; everyone will come to this
session ready to discuss and ask questions about everyone else’s abstract (10 minutes max. per
student).

4) A conference paper of exactly 10 pages will be due at the end of term (date TBD).

Books

Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (Anagrama or Vintage español / Picador or Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Samanta Schweblin, Distancia de rescate / Fever Dream (Penguin Random House)
Yuri Herrera, Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (Editorial Periférica) / Signs preceding the end
of the world (And Other Stories Publishing)
Jason de León, The Land of Open Graves. Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (University of
California Press)

All other readings will be available in electronic format on the course’s canvas website -- Literary,
critical and theoretical texts can be read in Spanish, French, English, German or in translation -- You
can buy them new, used or read digital copies: it’s entirely up to you.

Schedule

Week 1 (9/6) - Introduction: What has ended? What exactly have we lost?
Readings and materials: Students will read Bolaño’s short story “El Ojo Silva”/ “Mauricio ‘The Eye’
Silva” ahead of this first class (find it here in Spanish and here in English) and Elizabeth Bishop’s
poem “One art” (find it here). In class we’ll analyze art by Bouchra Khalili, Francis Allÿs, Subhankar
Banerjee, Marco Poloni, Leila Alaoui, Daniel Castro García and Daniel Richter.

Week 2 (9/13) - What was cosmopolitanism? What was the world?

Readings: Immanuel Kant, “Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” and “On
Perpetual Peace”. Martha Nussbaum, “Kant and Cosmopolitanism” and “Patriotism or
Cosmopolitanism”. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Afterword to Cosmopolitanisms”. David Harvey, “The
New Cosmopolitans”. Bruce Robbins, “The Starving Child” (from The Beneficiary). Silviano
Santiago, “The Cosmopolitanism of the Poor”. Achille Mbembe, “Afropolitanism”.

Week 3 (9/20) - The end of the world, crises of cosmopolitanism I: the possibility of hospitality
Readings: Immanuel Kant, “On Perpetual Peace” (again). Jacques Derrida, “A word of welcome” (in
Adieu to Levinas), “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility”. Pheng Cheah, “To open: hospitality and
alienation”. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to ourselves (selections). Slavoj Zizek, Against the double
blackmail. Refugees, terror and other troubles with neighbors (selection).
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Week 4 (9/27) - The end of the world, crises of cosmopolitanism II: the refugee and the end of
universal rights
Readings: Hannah Arendt, “The decline of the nation state and the end of the rights of man” (in
Imperialism. Part two of The Origins of Totalitarianism), and “We refugees” (Menorah, 1943). Seyla
Benhabib, “‘The right to have rights’: Hannah Arendt on the contradictions of the nation state”.
Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond human rights” and “What is a camp?”. Ayten Gündoğdu, Rightlessness in
an age of rights. Hannah Arendt and the contemporary struggles of migrants (pp.181-212). Lyndsey
Stonebridge, “‘That which you are denying us’: refugees, rights and writing in Arendt” and “The
refugee camp as poetic archive”. Rachel Potter and Lyndsey Stonebridge, “Writing and rights”.
Optional additional reading: Asher Lazarus Hirsch and Nathan Bell, “The Right to Have Rights as a
Right to Enter”. Daniel Loick, “We refugees” (Public Seminar);

Week 5 (10/4) - Going nowhere, barely surviving: border crossing without a world
Readings and materials: Yuri Herrera, Señales que precederán al fin del mundo / Signs preceding
the end of the world. Jason de León, The Land of Open Graves. Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail
(selection). Sayak Valencia, “Tijuana” (in Gore Capitalism). Neil Thomas, “Moving borders” (in
Theory of the border). Film: “De l'autre côte (From the Other Side)”, Directed by Chantal Ackerman
(2002). Monica Szurmuk, “Sobre ‘De l'autre côte’ de Chantal Ackerman”. “Locking Syrians out”:
Photographs of the Hungarian, Serbian and Bulgarian borders (2016). Jason de León: The
undocumented migration project (http://undocumentedmigrationproject.com)

Week 6 (10/11) - Prof. Homi Bhabha visits our seminar: A conversation about his most recent
work on migration and refugees
Readings: Homi K. Bhabha, “Imitations of the Afterlife: On Migration, Memory, and the Dialectics
of Translation”, “On Arendt’s ‘We refugees’” and “Spectral Sovereignty, Vernacular Cosmopolitans,
and Cosmopolitan Memories”. Frank Schulze-Engler, “Even the dead have human rights. A
Conversation with Homi K. Bhabha”. Mariano Siskind, “Dislocaciones de una biografía intelectual:
del postcolonialismo al discurso de los derechos (Entrevista a Homi Bhabha)”.

Week 7 (10/18) - NO CLASS (we will make up this class on 12/6) - Use the extra week to read
Bolaño’s 2666).

Week 8 (10/25) - A literature for the end of the world: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666
Reading: Roberto Bolaño, 2666

Week 9 (11/1) - When is the end of the world? Thoughts on the temporalities of contemporaneity
Reading: Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (in Untimely meditations).
Agamben, “What is the contemporary?” and “On contemporaneity”. Jacques Ranciere, “In what time
do we live in?”. Boris Groys: “Comrades of time”. César Aira: “Sobre el arte contemporáneo”. Jean‐
Luc Nancy, “Art Today”. Georges Didi-Huberman, “Ouverture L’histoire de l’art comme discipline
anachronique” (in Devant le temps. Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images). Pedro Erber,
“Contemporaneity and Its Discontents”. Svetlana Boym, The Off-Modern (1-11, 21-33, 43-8, 85-9).
Sarah Brouillette, Mathias Nilges and Emilio Sauri, “Contemporaneity: on refusing to live in the
moment”. Isabel Lorey, “The Government of the Precarious: An Introduction”, “Precariousness and
Precarity” (in State of Insecurity. Government of the Precarious). Judith Butler and Athena
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Athanasiou. “Aporetic dispossession, or the trouble with dispossession” (in Dispossession: the
performative in the political”. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the philosophy of history”

Week 10 (11/8) - The end of the world, literally: ecological crisis

Anthropocene:
Readings: Samanta Schweblin, Distancia de rescate / Fever Dream. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The
Climate of history: Four Theses” and The Human Condition in the Anthropocene (Tanner Lecture).
Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”. Bruno
Latour, “Waiting for Gaia. Composing the common world through arts and politics” (Facing Gaia:
eight lectures on the climatic regime, pp. 217-9). Ursula K. Heise, “Introduction: From the End of
Natureto the Beginning of the Anthropocene” (in Imagining extinction. The cultural meanings of
endangered species). Amitav Ghosh, “Stories” (in The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the
Unthinkable). Maria Woolson, “The melting of humankind”. Gisela Heffes, “Para una ecocrítica
latinoamericana: entre la postulación de un ecocentrismo crítico y la crítica a un antropocentrismo
hegemónico”

Week 11 (11/15) - Screening the end of the world: dystopian imaginings

Readings and materials: Susan Sontag, “The imagination of disaster”. Fredric Jameson, “Progress
Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?”. Mark Fisher, “It's easier to imagine the end of the
world than the end of capitalism”. Films and TV shows: “Juan de los muertos” (Dir. Alejandro
Brugués, 2011); “Children of Men” (Dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2006); “3%” (Brazilian TV series, created
by Pedro Aguilera, 2016-17).

Week 12 (11/22) - NO CLASS: Thanksgiving

Week 13 (11/29) - Mourning the end of the world: melancholic engagements with what we lost:
aesthetic, political and academic reflections.
Readings and materials: Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”. Julia Kristeva, Black
sun. Depression and melancholia (1-31). Walter Benjamin, “Left-Wing Melancholia”. Wendy
Brown, “Resisting Left-Wing Melancholia”. Jody Dean, Jody Dean, The Communist Horizon
(pp.157-179). Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia (selections). Films: “The World” (Dir. Jia
Zhangke, 2004); “Melancholia” (Dir. Lars von Trier, 2011).

Week 14 (12/6) - Special session: presentation and discussion of conference papers abstracts

Travel through landscapes of loss and desolation: Martin Caparros, Hunger (Selection); Lina Meruane, Volverse
palestina; Daniel Trilling, Lights in The Distance. Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe (Selection).
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Collaboration Policy Statement

Discussion and the exchange of ideas are essential to academic work. For assignments in this course, you are
encouraged to consult with your classmates on the choice of paper topics and to share sources. You may find it
useful to discuss your chosen topic with your peers, particularly if you are working on the same topic as a classmate.
Furthermore, you may work with the RLL Tutoring Center to work on your Spanish language skills. However, you
should ensure that any written work you submit for evaluation is the result of your own research and writing and that
it reflects your own approach to the topic. You must also adhere to standard citation practices in this discipline and
properly cite any books, articles, websites, lectures, etc. that have helped you with your work. If you received any
help with your writing (feedback on drafts, etc), you must also acknowledge this assistance.