Spring 2027
Core Courses
Mysticism as Method: Critical Theory, The Frankfurt School, and the Problem of Transcendence
(ENGLISH 250 / STRELIG 200)
Poulomi Saha
Tuesdays, 3:30 - 6:30 PM
Class #25378
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.
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Electives
Advanced Studies: Sources/General Literature of the Several Fields: Europe
Law, Sovereignty, and the Sacred: 1650-1850
(HISTORY 280B / STRELIG 290)
Jonathan Sheehan
Thursday, 10 AM - 12 PM
Class #34071
The autonomy of law—the “law” that rules and authorizes the modern liberal state—should not be taken for granted. This course explores the history, emergence, and paradoxes of this ideal in Europe over the long Enlightenment. Topics and problems include: law and political sovereignty, the theory and practice of legal pluralism, law in the theater of empire, the fate of Jewish law, the theory and practices of legal reasoning, the emergence of natural law and the law of nature, the challenge of legal secularism, law and revolution, the anthropology and history of law, and others. Readings will engage with both contemporary theories and histories of law, as well as key writers from the period (e.g., Hobbes, Pufendorf, Vico, Blackstone, Beccaria, Rousseau, Mendelssohn, Kant, Savigny, Austin).
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Readings in Indian Buddhist Texts
(BUDDSTD C215 / STRELIG 290)
Alexander Von Rospatt
Wednesday, 2 - 5 PM
Class #24947
Must be taken for 4 units
In this seminar, we will explore different formulations and theorizations of the process of rebirth across Buddhist traditions, drawing on early Mahāyāna sūtras, Sarvāstivāda and Theravāda Abhidharma compendia, and other materials. How is the moment of death imagined, and how is it connected to the first moment of consciousness in the subsequent existence? We will start with the Bhavasaṅkrānti, an early Mahāyāna sūtra, and its different iterations. The sutra’s first section, a prose passage followed by verses with a Madhyamaka inflection, examines the process by which consciousness at the moment of death connects to the first moment of consciousness in the subsequent existence. From there, we will turn to other texts, including the Garbhāvakrāntisūtra (and possibly Kṣemendra’s Garbhāvakrānti‑nirdeśa, the 10th pallava of his Bodhisattvāvadānakalpalatā), the Abhidharmakośa’s treatment of the intermediate existence (antarabhāva), and Saṅghabhadra’s sustained argument in support of an intermediate state between death and rebirth. We may extend the discussion to different conceptualizations of the interval between the passing of an anāgāmin and the attainment of arhatship.
While we will foreground the reading of primary sources, as preserved in Sanskrit/Pali or in Chinese or Tibetan translations, we would also like to consider anthropological materials. For this, we may examine deathbed practices as attested in the Japanese tradition, drawing on the work of Jackie Stone, and in the Southeast Asian Theravāda tradition, drawing on the work of Trent Walker.