The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research provides liberal arts educational opportunities to local communities. We have 16 new exciting classes coming up this fall, taught around Manhattan and Brooklyn. Contact us at [email protected] for more information. Series tickets cost $315, locations vary.
“They found beauty bitter,” Arthur C. Danto writes of the later Dada artists, “because they were embittered by a society that venerated beauty”. In the movement from pre-World War I to post-World War I avant-gardes, the problem of how to make and respond to art beyond the limits of beauty preoccupied the architects of European →
Few contemporary intellectuals have generated enough interest in their work to achieve simultaneous fame and infamy, yet this distinction undoubtedly applies to Edward Said (1935-2003). In the aftermath of his monumental Orientalism (1978) and his outspoken advocacy on behalf of the Palestinian people, Said became a lightning rod within both academic and policy debates about multiculturalism, Euro-American exceptionalism, →
Since antiquity, Herodotus has been proclaimed the Father of History and the Father of Lies; and others have found in Herodotus the origins of western ethnographic writing. In our course, we will read and discuss the entirety of Herodotus’ Histories, with particular attention to the dialogic variety of narratives—historical, anthropological, philosophical—that constitute the whole. In particular, →
In 1917, Sigmund Freud wrote: “clinical psychiatry takes little notice of the outward form or content of individual symptoms, but psycho-analysis…has established in the first place the fact that symptoms have a meaning.” This course will investigate Freud’s initial forays into what and how symptoms mean via his discovery of psychoanalysis in the late 19th →
Walter Benjamin once wrote that The Arcades Project was “the theater of all my struggles and all my ideas.” Never completed and well over a decade in the making, The Arcades Project takes on the presentation and history of an entire era and place: the Parisian Arcades of the early 19th century. Via quotations, observations, commentaries, philosophical fragments, and “literary →
Feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway writes: “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are all cyborgs.” As living as a human-technology hybrid has become a reality for many, science studies scholars have identified the cyborg as →
“Beneath [the great buildings] Rufus walked, one of the fallen—for the weight of this city was murderous—one of those who had been crushed on the day, which was every day, these towers fell.” –James Baldwin, Another Country New York is a city immortalized many times over in word, image, and sound; it wears many faces, →
“A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.” -Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” World War →
Until his death in 1981, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan always insisted that he was a thoroughgoing Freudian—perhaps the most orthodox Freudian of them all. A larger-than-life provocateur, Lacan’s oracular lectures and clinical innovations (including the notorious “short session”) ultimately led to his excommunication from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1964. Yet despite these departures from analytic orthodoxy, →
Are artists saints? Franz Kafka famously asked his friend Max Brod—a popular critic in his own day—to burn all of his papers after his death. This included the vast majority of Kafka’s work, as he had published only a handful of stories in his own lifetime. Brod did not oblige. Instead, he began the publication →
Opera—in which kings and queens, gods and heroes bare their souls in song—is more intimately concerned than any other artistic genre with the connection between private passion and political destiny, between the fate of the individual and that of the state. In the early twentieth century, as political life became increasingly mechanized and totalitarian regimes →
“From the paradise that Cantor created for us, no-one can expel us.” —David Hilbert, “On the Infinite,” 1926 This course is a historical approach to the mathematics of infinity, with a focus on conceptual and philosophical questions. We will begin with the ancient Greeks’ discovery of irrational numbers and discussions of Zeno’s paradoxes, then jump →
In the mid-nineteenth century, a young Karl Marx wrote, in the form of a published open letter to Arnold Ruge: “But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present-I →
This course seeks to understand what were the possibilities (and limits) of radical political and cultural transformation in the United States between 1929 and 1941. Most of the readings will focus on New York City, but imagining a national culture and international solidarity will also be important themes.The readings for the course, which include fiction, poetry, →
In 1930, Max Horkheimer became the director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Along with his colleagues and a broader orbit of external scholars, he inaugurated the first wave of what came to be called “critical theory.” This course is an introduction to some of the key works and concepts of the →
For many listeners, Johann Sebastian Bach is the authoritative standard by which all other composers are judged. His music is often considered both timeless and universal. But Bach’s very preeminence has made it hard to see him clearly—to discern the human face behind the “face of classical music.” The purpose of this course is to →
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