Required of all Ph.D. students. Advanced study in various fields, leading to a substantial piece of writing. Offerings vary from semester to semester. Students should consult the department's "Announcement of Classes" for offerings well before the beginning of the semester.

The project of the Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer famously announced in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, “was the disenchantment of the world.” While the two German sociologists credited as founders of the Frankfurt School and progenitors of contemporary Critical Theory are hardly the only ones to make this exact proclamation, the state of the (Western, post- Enlightenment) world’s enchantment, its lack, or its return remain an issue of perennial philosophical, social, and cultural concern. It is curious given the fascination of early Critical Theorists—not just Adorno and Horkheimer and their European contemporaries like Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, but also their intellectual antecedents Hegel, Kant, Marx, and Freud—with this condition of enchantment that so much of contemporary work in the field has hewed so stubbornly towards materialist and often hyper-empiricist investments. This graduate seminar explores the intersection between mysticism and Critical Theory, focusing on how mystical modes of thought—particularly Kabbalistic traditions and other esoteric frameworks—can be employed as methodologies of critique. We will examine the historical development of the Frankfurt School, paying special attention to how its leading thinks engaged with questions of knowledge, empiricism, rationality, and their critiques of Enlightenment reason. The course also investigates how these critiques overlap with mystical traditions, offering alternative ways of understanding reality, truth, and social transformation. This course returns to the emancipatory aim of Critical Theory that is imbued with mystical force, to ask how states of altered consciousness and ineffable experience may reimagine the very work of humanist critique. Mystical experience shatters the fantasy of knowing subject. In so doing, it furnishes the terms of a different form of knowledge, one which refuses the imperialism of coherence and representation. Together, we will delve into the historical and philosophical bases of the Frankfurt School, explore attendant and alternative theoretical traditions, to explore mystical modes can inform political and philosophical critique. From mystical consciousness to prophetic mysticism, we will develop an understanding of critical methodology inaugurated by states of ineffability and spiritual self-abnegation. At the same time, we will engage contemporary scholarship on mysticism and Critical Theory particularly attuned to questions of sexual difference, race, and empire that underpin these projects.

Texts and thinkers include:
deCerteau, Benjamin, Fromm, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, James, Eckhart, Bataille, Irigaray, Scholem

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