Hussein Agrama 

55700. Tradition, Temporality and Authority. The opposition between modernity and tradition, and between modern and traditional societies, has long been questioned within social theory. But many of the crucial presuppositions that made this opposition seem initially plausible still remain, having gone largely unexplored and unquestioned. Nowhere is this more evident than in the scholarship on Islam and the Middle East. In this seminar, we look into some of these presuppositions, especially ones about time and history. Going between texts in history and philosophy and ethnographies of Islam, we will attempt to rethink the idea of tradition by exploring the links between ideas of temporality, authority, and embodiment. 

55800. Sovereignty and Suffering. This highly exploratory seminar aims to look into how some of the felt paradoxes of sovereignty arise from the sensibilities about pain and suffering constituted within liberal traditions. The elimination of cruelty and suffering is a hallmark of liberal notions of progress and development. However, it might be more apt to see liberal political and legal traditions as a set of ongoing concepts and practices that work not to eliminate cruelty but to prescribe and create an acceptable distribution of pain and suffering in the world.
Yet contemporary liberal sensibilities on suffering, cruelty and pain are quite contradictory. Thus, torture is unacceptable - as a deep violation of one's humanity, its practice is a scandal. Forcing an ill person to live out the last days of life in great pain and debilitation is no such violation, no such scandal. Ending that life, however, is - hence the heated debated over euthanasia. And while individual torture is unacceptable, collateral damage in war - often much more massive and severe - is both acceptable and legal. Is your humanity violated if you've been collaterally damaged or killed? But more, economic sanctions and structural adjustment policies, whether in peace or war, are typically legal and acceptable despite the widespread (and equally widely acknowledged) suffering they cause. Self inflicted pain for sport and even sometimes art is often embraced and admired. But self-inflicted pain for religious reasons often disturbs the same set of observers - despite their commitment to religious toleration and their acknowledgment of the importance of spirituality to so many people. Suicide bombing is repugnant. But the prospect of suicidal war and mutually assured destruction is and has long been countenanced in politics and law. Except for those who do not value life in the evidently strange ways that contemporary liberals do.
Despite how strange these sensibilities are, little systematic exploration of them has been done. That would be a worthwhile endeavor, not just for its own sake, but also because it helps tell us how liberal legal and political traditions conceptualize the limits of "the human." Especially as it has come to be conceived increasingly in juridical and legal terms, as the growing salience of notions of "human rights" and "crimes against humanity" after WW2 attests. What's interesting about this is that "the human" comes to be increasingly thought of in legal and juridical terms partly as a response and remedy to some of the problems entailed in sovereignty. And so there is a relationship between the problems of sovereignty, the definition and limits of what is human, and sensibilities about suffering, within liberal traditions; a relationship that warrants exploration. To that end, we will read widely, from ethnography, history, philosophy and legal theory.