The course aims to analyze culture as an ethical construction and, subsidiarily, ethics as cultural production. The practice and theorizations of culture are ways of handling central concepts of the ethical tradition, which are implicitly manifested in literature and art, in religious experience, or in the diverse manifestations of popular culture. There is no moral concept that does not have its counterpart in the cultural, so that a rigorous ethical analysis of culture ends up being equivalent to the tracing of a very precise map of cultural practices.
More specifically, the premise of this program will be the recovery of an idea of ethics as the pursuit of the good life, which is intimately linked to the idea of "ways of living". Unlike the individualistic "lifestyles" of the variety magazines, a "way of life" necessarily implies a management of individual ends that takes into account the objective circumstance and collective life. From this assumption, the course will analyze forms of alienation that primarily affect the way of life. It will serve, therefore, as a study of contemporary social pathologies, for which it will draw on the theoretical tradition of critical theory in its most recent developments.
ABOUT CULTURE AS ETHICS
1. Ethical models of culture: habit, norm, discomfort, debt, discipline, excess, transgression
2. Culture as the production of norms and repertoire of values.
3. Ethics, community and prejudice: the collective sources of the self in modernity (late)
CULTURE, SUBJECTIVITY AND POWER RELATIONS
4. Culture, identity and processes of subjectivation.
5. Ideology: uses and history of a concept.
6. Hegemony, culture and common sense.
7. Cultural criticism and emancipation: another name for ethics?
THE FORM OF CULTURAL CONFLICTS
8. Cultural distinction and exclusion
9. Normative potential of the awareness of injustice in subordinate groups.
10. Ethical and epistemic decolonization processes: ethics of miscegenation.
11. The multiculturalist program and its failures.
12. Interculturality and intersectionality: state of the question.