180087 KU Subjectification processes as an occurrence (2022S)

In this seminar, different texts will be read and discussed on behalve of the question, what constitutes a subject, or how it is formed. The starting thesis is that the abandonment of the fully active and empowered subject has to be accepted at the latest with the advent of the theories that are often called postmodern. That is, the seminar will deal with texts that consider the role of social structures, social processes, and the political and economic situation as fundamental to the formation of a subject. It follows that subjectification, as the process of becoming a subject, to a serious extent does not happen from within the subject itself, but happens to people, making them subjects.
The aim of the course is to approach this very general statement in a more differentiated way and to name distinguishable forms of subjectification and to show their interactions by looking at the way in which certain processes of subjectification happen to people.
In doing so, the three terms in the subtitle "Submission, Insult, Responsibility" are an anticipation of possible formulations of the different subjectivation processes that befall.
Furthermore, these areas will have different methodological foci. In the first third of the seminar, some basics of the contemporary theory of subjectivation will be addressed. In the second third, students will focus on reading a longer text in its entirety and following the arguments therein across chapters. In the last third of the seminar, students will turn to four texts that map a discourse and trace its change over time, but also through the perspectives of the colonized and the colonizer. In this way, various techniques and skills necessary for scholarly work will be practiced and expanded in the seminar, and a comprehensive understanding of the texts read will be achieved.