This is the homepage for Robert C. Thomas, Ph.D. I've created this space primarily to connect with my students by uploading course information and creating blogs for my classes. At some point I hope to find time to upload some of my own work. I've also included information about myself, such as my biography and C.V.
Academic Biography
I teach in the Department of Humanities at San Francisco State University and at College of Alameda. I'm primarily interested in the relationship between contemporary culture and the history of Western philosophy. My teaching and research interests include the state of exception, affect, biopolitics, narratives of bearing witness, theories of the image, subjectivity, cinema studies, porn studies, modernism and modernity, ethics, literature, the spectacle, political economy, and music. My work makes use of diverse figures such as: Spinoza, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Robert Walser, Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Antonio Negri, Guy Debord, and Giorgio Agamben, with whom I studied at UC Berkeley in the fall of 1999 in the seminars on The Time That is Left.) I am the author of Broken: Thought-Images of Life in the State of Exception, which is on affect, everyday life, and the state of exception. I am currently working on a book on film, pornography, music, monstrosity, and the political philosophy of love entitled Gestures of Love. I hold a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Program in Philosophy, Literature, and the Theory of Criticism at the State University of New York (SUNY), Binghamton, a M.A. in Philosophy from SUNY, Binghamton, a M.A. in Humanities from San Francisco State University and a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Evergreen State College (Olympia, WA).
Personal Biography
I live in the sunset/ocean beach neighborhood in San Francisco, which I completely love, teach cool classes at SFSU like porn studies, ride mopeds in the Moped Army, used to skateboard, am always threatening to learn to surf, I like to take trips up and down the coast when I can, go see occasional concerts with cool bands, take trips to Las Vegas (the city is a paradigm for modernity and parallels aspects of the Paris Arcades, and I love its beautifully broken local culture), go to clubs, sing karaoke and drink beer. I listen to all kinds of music, love film, watch bad TV, and take the occasional trip to the art museum or gallery. Most of my life is devoted to teaching, which I love, even though it leaves me with little to no time for my own work. Like a lot of people trying to navigate their way through the present, I pretty much just try to have the best life that I can.