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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
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The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, established in 2011, offers liberal arts education and research opportunities to local communities while supporting young scholars. With a mission to engage various intellectual traditions, the institute aims to provide accessible education and foster active, engaged citizens.
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Imaginary Numbers: Theory, Mathematics, and Possibility
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
The very idea of imaginary numbers appears at first glance preposterous, like something out of science fiction or the wildest philosophy. A real or ordinary number multiplied by an “imaginary unit” somehow mathematically produces a “complex” number that has both theoretical and practical applications. Rene Descartes, who coined the “imaginary” terminology, deemed them preposterous. And yet, imaginary numbers are indispensable—not...
Reading the Odyssey
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Homer’s Odyssey tells the tale of a mortal who suffers and who comes to know the “cities and minds” of humans. The travels and ordeals of Odysseus, as he moves from the ruins of Troy to the new civic possibilities of Ithaca, elaborate two constitutive myths: the first is the tale of the hero’s homecoming—the nostos, or “mindful return”—in which Odysseus gives up immortality with a goddess to instead regain his home, wife, and son;...
What is Nationalism?
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Long regarded as the stuff of 19th century romanticism and 20th century warfare, nationalism is resurgent on the global stage. Despite—or, perhaps, because of—globalization, instant communication, and the seeming erosion of state supremacy, ideas about national sovereignty, national economies, and the preservation of national character have gained greater purchase at the ballot box. Moreover, though historians widely agree that...
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Philosophy of Fashion
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 505 Carroll St, Brooklyn, NY
“For the philosopher,” writes Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project, “the most interesting thing about fashion is its extraordinary anticipations.” In other words, fashion is, in itself, an avant-garde: it shows us what the world will be like before that world has fully arrived. Its uncanny relation to the new is by no means the only philosophically interesting thing about fashion. And yet, philosophy (often coded masculine, serious,...
Friedrich Nietzsche: Truth and Morality
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online, New York, NY
Friedrich Nietzsche is among the most notorious and controversial thinkers in the western intellectual tradition. He aimed to philosophize “with a hammer,” to demolish the philosophical tradition founded by Socrates and Plato and slaughter its most sacred cows. Central to that tradition is the value placed on truth, reason, objectivity, and a moral system based on altruism and self-sacrifice. In contrast to forming the bedrock of a stable...
Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online, New York, NY
Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology: a Critical Introduction If much of continental philosophy takes as its fundamental orientation a perspective that originates in the late 18th century, how equipped can it be to address issues of urgent contemporary concern: ecological crisis, the pre-eminence of digital technology, neuroscientific advances, and the blurring of the lines between humans and machines? Motivated by such concerns, and...
Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Literature
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Literature: an Introduction to Hélène Cixous How can psychoanalysis be used to understand literature—not as an object of study, but as a mode of experiencing life through reading and writing? For Hélène Cixous, the “French Feminist” perhaps best known for the controversial practice of “feminine writing” (écriture feminine), literature offers a means of engaging and subverting systems of sexual hierarchy...
New Sounds: Classical Music in the 21st Century
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
What is New Music? The diversity of “contemporary classical music”—to cite a perhaps oxymoronic designation—is evident in the very use of the moniker “new.” In one sense, the label is almost as old as music itself, seized on by the many movements that defined themselves in terms of their contemporaneity. But to past movements like modernism, “new music” was a battle cry, representing a positive aesthetic program, a style, an ideology—the...
Donna Haraway: Cyborgs, Science, and Gender
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online, New York, NY
Over the last four decades, biologist and philosopher of science Donna Haraway has revolutionized how social theorists and scientists understand the situated objectivity of scientific knowledge. She had paid special attention to the ways in which technology and science assign biological meaning to social categories. While Haraway is most famously associated with Cyborg Theory, this course will offer students an opportunity to survey the full...
The Black Jacobins: Liberation, Political Theory
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
The Black Jacobins: Liberation, Political Theory, and the Haitian Revolution The Haitian Revolution marked not only the liberation of Haiti from French colonial rule, but also, in Cedric Robinson’s words, “the first slave society to achieve the permanent destruction of the slave system.” As with the Paris Commune later in the 19th century and the Bolshevik Revolution in the early 20th, the Haitian Revolution was met with particularly acute...
Feminist Killjoys: an Introduction to Sara Ahmed
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
What does it mean to be a feminist killjoy? Why are some actions and expressions recognized as bold but others stigmatized as willful? For feminist theorist Sara Ahmed, our embodied experiences are foundational to the ways we move through the world. That is, certain marked bodies—be they queer, black, brown, and/or woman—encounter pressure, resistance, or violence as they attempt to make space and flourish beyond the boundaries of the normative...
Stoicism: a Philosophical Introduction
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
“Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.” Taken from Epictetus’ Handbook, this maxim expresses a signature teaching of the ancient philosophy of Stoicism; it encapsulates Stoicism’s resolution to the problem of life’s turbulences, from sour emotions (the coffee shop is out of my favorite drink) to overweening grief (a loved one unexpectedly...
What is Participatory Democracy?
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
What is Participatory Democracy? Theory, Activism, and Power Since its first formulation in the early 1960s, the concept of “participatory democracy” has come to take on multiple meanings—some of them complementary, others conflicting. Promoted by a wide variety of theorists, activists, social movements, and political parties, conceptions of participatory democracy range from deepened civic engagement to procedural reform to the wholesale...
Modern Monetary Theory: A Critical Introduction
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
With the conspicuous failure of austerity measures in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and with the discourse surrounding the U.S. national debt shifting from alarmism to benign acceptance, Modern Monetary Theory, a relatively new (or perhaps not so new) conceptualization of money and government finance, has gained traction and attention in both heterodox economics and mainstream policy circles. For Modern Monetary Theorists, governments do...
Pleasure: Theory, Aesthetics, and Philosophy
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Why do we hear so much about desire and so little about pleasure? When Roland Barthes asked the question, he concluded that while desire has dignity for contemporary philosophers and theorists, pleasure does not. If desire gets its prestige from what we lack, pleasure is often, for better and worse, about what we have—and what we can’t help having. Its immediacy throws into relief the ambient conditions of our lives: social arrangements; embodied...
The Paris Commune: Revolution and Utopia
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
150 years ago, the workers and soldiers of Paris raised the flag of the “Universal Republic.” With this they formally established the Paris Commune: a radical experiment in collective government, social and cultural transformation, and worker autonomy. Momentarily setting aside ongoing conflicts, major European powers came together to quickly crush the nascent government—with a vengeance many times more bloody than the French Revolutionary...
Theocracy: God, Power, and Authority
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Anathema secular society, the term theocracy—meaning, “rule by God”—was coined circa 100 CE by Roman historian Flavius Josephus to defend Jewish governance from its Roman detractors. He extolled the virtues of Moses as lawgiver and grounded the superiority of theocratic law in the idea that religion makes it widely accessible and inscribes it in practice. Yet, God cannot rule directly, so what, exactly, does theocracy entail? Is theocracy,...
Lenin: Empire, Capital, and Revolution
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
What is socialism? Today the word usually describes national electoral projects encouraging states to redistribute wealth. A century ago, though, socialist politics included on its left flank an altogether different vision. From Italy to India, those who called themselves Bolsheviks sought transnational coordination to collapse empires and states, more often mobilising the language of emancipation than material equality. They were inspired by an...
Glenn Gould: Music, Genius, and Interpretation
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Within a decade of his death, the pianist Glenn Gould had assumed an almost mythic status, fêted by Edward Said, lionized in experimental films, and fictionalized by the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard. While other musicians might rival him in album sales, Gould came to symbolize his art form as a whole: classical music was a traditional field in an age of modern technology and mass media, and in Gould—recluse and celebrity, ascetic and showman,...
The First Marxist: an Introduction to Friedrich Engels
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
From the underground League of the Just of the 1840s through the First and Second International to the rise of mass workers parties at the turn of the 20th century, Friedrich Engels labored tirelessly to turn Marxism into a revolutionary force. Sacrificing his own intellectual ambitions to support Marx, Engels took on the role of sounding board, commentator, editor, ghost writer, and benefactor while the latter labored on his masterwork Capital...
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