Philosophy and Critical Theory (PHCRT) courses focus on developing critical reading and thinking skills, with an emphasis on learning to frame and explore meaningful questions. Students consider multiple perspectives and claims in the process of formulating independent, well-founded opinions.From Buddha to Bataille, Eros to Wilde, Marx to Media Platforms, Freud to Cyborgs and Wall Street IPOs, desire is the Trickster who hides within the gardens of the sensuous and the market, who lurks behind the altars of passion, repression, and allure. Algorithm, Icon, fetish, logo, idol, brand, hot and cool, hand and skin, dream– desire is indeed the silver coin and golden bite, the primal scream, the screen, the color of the eye. Desire is opaque obsession, projection, obscure temptation, nostalgia, longing, excess, memory scent, engine of commerce and war. Orgasmic Magus, fantastic Wiccan, creative might, sleepless night, whisper to the ear, high crack in the ice, leakage, fear, protoplasmic tear. Desire is an iceberg floating in a melting sea of oil and greed, tectonic tremor, shifting, changing, slipping, restless void, drunken shadow, devouring bot, sidereal appetite. This course aims to understand how the above “economies” of affect and desire mix with myth and religion, our psychic and material economies, and our brain cartographies– in particular, with love, sex and gender, race and class, fear, violence and peace, semiotic representations and the unconscious. The crafty aesthetics of commodity fetishism and the society of the Spectacle, Big Data, and the emotariat of contemporary post-Fordist, emotional capitalism will be examined in the global economies of consumption and finance, art markets, technology, fashion, social media, and the image. Finally, we will ask what next beyond endless “innovation” wants, mindless shopping and waste, permanent hunger and need. To try to harmonize the “reptile and mammal” behind our neocortex, with the elemental ecologies of water and air, fire and earth– So that, optimally, we may find our mind's hearth in the arts and cultures of our lived common(s).

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