MIDTERM ORAL EXAMS
February 6 – 10
GENERAL INSTRUCTIONS
1. Come in business attire. For men – longsleeves with tie, leather shoes. For ladies – formal/business dress, sandals/shoes. Absolutely no slippers.
2. Do not overcrowd the lobby of the Department of Political Science. Only 5 students at most inside the department while exams are ongoing. If more than 5 students are inside the department, they will get a grade of F.
3. No study materials allowed inside the examination room.
4. You will be asked to pick from a box a number which will correspond to the thesis statement which you will defend during the 20-minute oral examination.
5. Examination procedure:
a. After picking the number, READ the entirety of the assigned thesis statement ALOUD. (Approx 1 min)
b. Briefly SUMMARIZE in a sentence or two WHAT the thesis statement is saying (Does it explain a concept? What concept? Does it critique a political reality? What reality? Does it provide an alternative perspective on something? Does it challenge a political theorist’s position/definition on/of a concept? Does it elucidate a shift in theoretical position?) (Approx 2 mins)
c. Discuss WHY the thesis statement is arguing what it argues (Is it because of a historical/theoretical motivation? Is it because a theorist’s depiction/explanation is inadequate or perverse? Is it because there is something in our contemporary political realities/consciousness that needs to be re-evaluated through a careful reading of the statement?) (Approx 3 mins)
d. Outline and discuss HOW the thesis statement argues its case. (Approx 1 min)
e. EXPLAIN the thesis statement line by line, argument by argument, step by step, image by image, occasionally quoting from a relevant passage from at least three authors discussed in the course of the semester. (Approx 10 mins)
f. SUMMARIZE what you have just said and CONNECT with other thesis statements. (Approx 2 mins)
6. Things to avoid:
a. Absolutely no Parang. You get an automatic grade of F (0) when you utter even a single Parang.
b. Excessive uhmms and ahs.
c. “At the end of the day”
d. “I personally believe”
e. “Sir, I’m done, do you have questions?”
7. Grading Criteria
a. Comprehensiveness (30%) Correctness (40%) Coherence of thought (15%) Presentation and confidence (10%) Originality of examples (5%)
THESIS STATEMENTS
1. Secular reason is unfree. The Enlightenment’s promise is betrayed by its own obliteration of the very conditions that make its promise possible. Unfreedom which the Enlightenment misconstrued as a condition of excessive authority is in fact the outcome of the arbitrariness that can only happen in the absence of authority, in the disavowal of religion. It is the core of utility (sapere aude!), the privatization of value.
2. The law of morality governs the social question. It reduces action to intention and in doing so dissolves the space of the political.
3. Desire, because of its relationality is the starting point of history. Hegel got it wrong: absolute consciousness is never attained by conflating object and subject, perception and reality. Distance is a necessary condition for desire. Dialectics abolishes distance and in so doing, makes desire transcendental, impractical. Caritas (love) is the most beautiful expression of true relationality. In love, desire opens, rather than transcended. In the context of Enlightenment secularity, one cannot truly love as utility closes, rather than opens the self. As such, secular reason is satisfied of its being condemned to exchange.
4. Religion, contrary to what Marx thought is not an opium, an escape. In fact, the religious ensures and guarantees that humanity will not attempt to escape. It is for this reason that the religious binds, founds and ties. It is as such, revolutionary. The secular, however, forces the world to escape from the labor of human beings: the world now having escaped can now be let loose upon the estranged humanity. For this reason, secularity is tantamount to irresponsibility.
5. Capitalism operates through equivalence. Socialism operates through equality. Equivalence is the demand of necessity. Equality is the claim of the free. The necessary in capitalism is politicized, the political in socialism becomes necessary. Both have mistaken the political for what it is not.
6. The abandonment of teleology is the reason why modernity failed to comprehend and thus, reject theology. This rejection of theology is the necessary condition for commodification: the flattening of substance.
7. Change, politically speaking is never constant. Marx failed to acknowledge this, thus he failed to completely fracture the endlessness of capitalist motion. In place of being controlled by abstract laws of expansion, Marx endorsed human control of nature. Both however constitute the same historical abstraction, which only an unchanging constant can truly apprehend.
8. Hierarchy – as fiction and myth – is a true work of art. As such it is only possible through collective action and can only rest on radical equality. Capitalism which operates through disorder makes no room for art and therefore for commonality. It cannot therefore begin. It will always be unequal.
9. The critique of the irrational can only be fulfilled by a return to the ethical.
10. True socialism can only exist as critique. By its own, it cannot transcend the mystical and as such remain abstract. Only with religion, can socialism realize its real, practical purpose.
11. Revolutionaries have only changed the world in many ways, the point is to believe.
