This session will introduce you to the module organization, structure and assignments. You will understand the time commitments you will need to make and the skills you will develop through the duration of the module.

During this week, we introduce the concept of violence, state control and the shaping of civilisations via power and subject formation. We examine the theoretical approaches as well as some examples from history, stretching back to the ancient empires up to the more recent modern state efforts to exercise a “monopoly on violence”.

During this week we examine the context of the initial approaches to building political entities that could give its members a sense of belonging, as well as the exclusion of others from such communities. Tracing through ancient and more recent texts, we see how political theories have sought to understand citizenship, belonging and exclusion.

During this week, we examine opposing traditional, liberal and radical views of history itself, and consider the ideas of history being cyclical and driven by conflicts and the alternative approach, which sees history as a progress upon which humans build their knowledge and shape a future.

During this week, we examine ancient uprisings, focussion on how many of these were based on irredentist or natural right exceptions- such as rejections of harm to people’s selves or beings and rights to exist. There was a more animalistic, less “modern” and property/law based reasoning for uprisings.

This week we examine the ideological revolts that became associated with the monotheistic religions. Judaism emerged from a revolt against Pharaoh and continued to have a spirit of revolt based on ideology more than taxes or rights. Jesus’ teachings were a revolt within Judasim in a sense, and the rise of Islam, as well as later rise of Protestantism under Martin Luther were further spiritual revolts against the monotheistic status quo.

During this week, we examine the way in which European societies during the medieval and early modern period began to have a social contract in which the rights and duties of rulers and ruled were given a level of definition. Tracing some of the famous rebellions such as the tax and peasant rebellions in England, we see how rebellions both extended the duties and rights of peoples but also assimilated them ever more into a subject/citizen status within a social contract system- often termed a “commonwealth” at the time.

During this week we examine the key shift of the Enlightenment era, at the end of the early modern and beginning of the modern era. We consider the concept of revolution as a much more total rebellion- one in which many of the forces and thoughts for progress, change and renovation were though to be permanent and constantly moving forward into an unknown future. We also think about this aspect of modernity as a feeling and symptom, as well as some of the key revolutionary movements of the modern era.

This week we examine the limits and counter-veiling approaches to a revolutionary spirit- namely, the post-enlightenment movements. In particular, we examine the romantic, traditional and nationalist backlash to the universalist, progressive and utopian ideas of the Englightement as they emerged during the long-19th Century. We then look at 20th Century period which saw a hardening of these rejections in the form of fascist and a variety of anti-European, ethno-nationalist movements as well as finishing with a consideration for the significant doubts cast upon Enlightenment claims of universality, equality, and progress that modern social and biological sciences have brought forth.

During this week, we examine some of the remaining elements of rebellion and revolution that survived the 19th and 20th century totalising, statist, and amalgamating spirit. In particular, we look are how the previously mass-bassed movements of uprising, rebellion and revolution gave way to an individualistic tradition, beginning with 19th century existentialists and then via psychological thinking and technological spaces- especially in information age of the 1950s onward.

As for this week, we pursue the final themes of the preceding week relating to informationalk exchange but we pursue a more critical view of developments, especially during the neo-liberal, hyper-capitalist final third of the 20th Century and in our current century. We see patterns of the breakdown of the individual identities popular among the earlier resistance movements as consumerism and complex global shifts happened as well as the fin-de-siecle nihilism and alienation that seems to have persisted into this century.

This week we examine the further deepening of alienation with a further concept of absorption. In this sense, resistance is “futile” because the hyper-real, totalising, and consistently revolutionary and shifting system of hyper-capitalist, hyper-variable and hyper-detached world order that we see in our era does not have any trouble with individuals seeking to resist or reject any of the culture- it simply absorbs such rejections and even promotes it as a quasi-product to further fuel itself. Of course, there is also the background issue of how all this means human agency, and humanity perhaps itself, is fading into a complex and decenterd technological system(s?). We consider whether there is indeed a possibility of rejection and rebellion/revolution that is fulfilling and avoids the various negatives of the past by way of negation of self in order to shift human approaches to ourselves, our society and our environment. We examine various ancient as well as more recent philosophical and scientific approaches that emphasise this need for a being-focussed as a opposed to self-focussed and a now-focussed as opposed to past and future-focussed metaphysics.