Online via Zoom
Historicity
Theoretical Explorations Module XXIV
Rohit Goel
2 - 26 February 2026
Mondays and Thursdays
8 Sessions
INR 7,500 Participation
INR 10,000 Participation + Writing
6:30 PM IST - 8:30 PM IST
Worldwide Registration Open
Download Course Poster
About the Course
The world is in a state of serial crisis — poverty, climate, war, populism, genocide.... This despite a deluge of facts about contemporary crises and their causes, exhibited variedly by scholars, journalists, legislators, activists, and artists. Factual depictions of catastrophe, however clear or creative, are not working to pull what Walter Benjamin called the 'emergency break' on the 'runaway train of history gone awry.
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This course asks why and attempts to contribute to an answer: we've lost a sense of historicity, the experience of historical time as it occurs, of the becoming of reality in the world. Today, historicity is blunted by a pervasive attitude of historicism: whatever we say, do, or make seems like it has always already happened, like a déjà vu, the 'end of history' impervious to change.
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Scholars and artists have been attentive to the historicist danger and the urgency of resurrecting historicity against it. Our course will consider closely and discuss, inter alia: Marx's critique of the historicist temporality of capital; Benjamin's concept of 'aura'; Freud and Lacan's notion of 'retroaction'; Francis Bacon's 'historicity of art; Paolo Virno's 'memory of the present'; and, Joan Copjec's approach to Kisarostami's cinema, images that subtract as they move.
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Resurrecting the concept of 'historicity', BICAR's new course in Theoretical Foundations aims to push scholars, artists, activists, and citizens to reorient the ways in which they think, speak, act, and create in a world steeped in catastrophe that feels inevitable but is not.
About the Professor
Rohit Goel is Director/Professor of the Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). He is the editor of Future Perfect: Catastrophe and Redemption in the Contemporary (Kaph 2023) and the co-editor of Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, Politics (Bloomsbury 2019). Rohit has taught courses in critical theory, historiography, and politics at the University of Chicago, Sciences Po Paris, the American University of Beirut, and Jnanapravaha Mumbai. He received the Fulbright IIE and Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) fellowships to pursue years of Arabic language study in Syria and was awarded the Fulbright DDRA and Andrew C. Mellon Fellowship for PhD dissertation research in primary sources in Lebanon. He completed his BA from Harvard College and, as Harvard University’s Paul Williams Fellow to Emmanuel College, was granted an MPhil in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge
Certificate
Students will receive a Certificate of Completion upon successful attendance of a course or a Certificate of Completion and Letter of Evaluation if they successfully attend and complete the final assignment. Those who complete three courses (attendance and writing) in the Theoretical Explorations over two calendar years are eligible for a BICAR Diploma in Theoretical Explorations.
Refund Policy
We will refund your mode of payment — minus a 25% processing fee — if you choose not to take this course after the first session. Or, you can ‘roll over’ your balance to another or future BICAR course without a fee deduction.
Groups of four or more participants who enrol together will receive a 25% discount.
Register
To register, we can facilitate two modes of payment — either a direct bank transfer to our Indian account or we also have a PayPal link: