This is a 300-level course on the figure of the public intellectual. It aims to familiarize students with the ideas of significant critical public intellectuals in a historical as well as the contemporary multicultural context. Etymologically, the word “intellectual” means someone who can choose between different options by reading between the lines and committing to one of the options. Therefore, it is a course that seeks to inculcate the importance of dissent and questioning the nature of power. The main preoccupation of this course is to highlight the role of those thinkers who launch critical discourses that help ordinary people question the rights of governmentality to impose itself on subjects.
This course also provides a broad view of different types of resistive discourses from cultures across the world. The main concern behind the selection of texts is whether a thinker has been able to question established ideas and, in this process, increase the awareness of the public about the impact of authoritative and normative discourses in limiting human freedoms. The main task of a public intellectual is, thus, imagined to be a harbinger of a spiritual largesse, a creator and an expander of spaces of freedom for the public, to make ordinary subjects realize the power of their feral, primitive, primal agency, and negotiate the extent to which their subjecthood is inscribed by discourses of power. The task of the intellectual is to recuperate the rapture that existed before power ruined time. This course attempts to be libertarian and reparative without being prescriptive in any phallogocentric sense.
