COL 638 - Heidegger on Tragedy
COL 731 - Ghosts: Ghostmodernity & Ghostcolonialism
COL 721 - Politics of Contemporary Ethical Thought
COL 722 - Affectivity and Political Radicalism
COL 705 - Virtual Femininity
COL 595 - Romantic Age
COL 638 - Heidegger on Tragedy (top)
Professor Rodolphe Gasché
Registration Numbers: (A) #373771(Seminar); (B) (Recitation)
Tuesday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640
In this course we will explore Heidegger's interpretation of Greek tragedy,and its importance for his understanding of the history of the West, and the fate of Europe. We will read among other texts, Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, as well as his interpretation of late poem by Hölderlin in ölderlin's Hymn "Der Ister." Familiarity with Sophocles'Antigone is highly recommended.
COL 731 - Ghosts: Ghostmodernity & Ghostcolonialism (top)
Professor Shaun Irlam
Registration Numbers: (A) #112196 (Seminar) (B) #171186(Recitation)
Monday 12:30-3:10, Clemens Hall 640
In a time of great social crisis, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Native American peoples of the high plains performed a series of solemn and anguished ghost dances that inaugurated the long throes of social death. As the post-age wanes, it appears that we too, are performing our own ghost dances. We live increasingly in an age of ghosts. Having passed the last posts, one appears to have entered the realm of ghosts. Increasingly, writers and critical theorists have turned to telling ghost stories of various sorts. The purpose of this course is to examine the recent currency of various ghostings, ghost-formations, ghost-hyphens, visitants and revenants in the conception and analysis of current cultural formations. What are the determining characteristics of the ghost-age? How is a ghost-phenomenology different from the phenomenology of Geist? Preserved in the concepts of ghost-colonialism, ghost-structuralism and ghost-modernism is the idea that these periods remain haunted by those epochs they have supposedly superseded, colonialism, structuralism, modernity. The age of the ghost- thus repudiates the possibility of any simple, linear historical narrative. At the same time, the close homonym of post- and ghost- permits the ghost-age to remain haunted, too, by those progressivist and utopian aspirations that were perhaps too easily embraced and celebrated by the various manifestations of the post-age.
Texts:
Freud, The Uncanny
Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel
Derrida, Spectres of Marx
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Etienne van Heerden, Ancestral Voices
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments
Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost
Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, Rings of Saturn
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters
COL 721 - Politics of Contemporary Ethical Thought (top)
Professor Ernesto Laclau
Registration Numbers: (A)#333706 (Seminar);(B)#470360 (Recitation)
Monday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640
The aim of this seminar is to explore the central question of the sources of moral obligation in contemporary ethical theory. The main question to be addressed is to what extent the ethical investment can be considered as radical and constitutive or, on the contrary, as partly predetermined by an a priori established normative content. Although at the beginning of the course a general panorama will be given of contemporary ethico-theoretical alternatives, the bulk of the seminar will concentrate on three authors: Levinas, Lacan and Badiou.In the last two sessions Prof.Laclau will present his own views concerning the links between the ethical and the normative and between ethics and politics.
COL 722 - Affectivity and Political Radicalism (top)
Professor Joan Copjec and Professor Ernesto Laclau
Registration Number: (A) #042522 (Seminar); (B)#378641(Recitation)
Tuesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640
This seminar is about politics and passions and the various ways they intersect. The underlying premise is that political radicalism, in its classical forms and as exhibited by "new social movements," demands analysis not just of events, acts, and ideology but also of the passions that shape and are shaped by them.
We will begin with the definition of the subject, with presentations by both Copjec and Laclau. The section of political radicalism presented by Professor Laclau will address the changes in the notion of political subjectivity, which were involved in the strategic oscillation of the radical political discourse of the West. The thesis is that strategic mutations have always involved considerable changes in the ontological presuppositions on which political action is based. Most of these changes are not explicit and have to be traced through new articulations of the various moments of strategic calculation. Reference will be made to the class-based discourse of classical Marxism, to various versions of Leninism, anarchism, the Gramscian turn, and finally to more contemporary attempts at a new approach to politics: Fanon on anti-colonialism, 1968 mobilizations, multiculturalism, Italian autonomism, anti-globalization movements, etc. A set of proposals will be put forward concerning the notions of antagonism, politico-hegemonic articulations, and strategic issues concerning subjectivity in the contemporary world.
In her section of the seminar, Professor Copjec will focus on two major concepts: catharsis and shame. We will discuss the reasons why acarthsis of the emotions became a political and aesthetic goal during the classical period; why catharsis was taken up and abandoned by psychoanalysis; and how some theorists are attempting to recuperate the notion today. We will then shift our attention to the sudden explosion of interest in the phenomenon of shame in an attempt to determine what motivates this interest in queer theory and elsewhere and develop our own understanding of this quintessentially social passion.
COL 705 - Virtual Femininity (top)
Professor Margherita Long
Registration Number: (A) #281601 (Seminar); (B) #114701 (Recitation)
Time to be announced; Clemens 219
COL 595 - Romantic Age (top)
Professor Henry Sussman
Registration Numbers: (A)#072744 (Seminar); (B) (Recitation)
Wednesday 3:30-6:10, Clemens Hall 640
The basic assumption of this course is that Romanticism is what Maurice Blanchot would call a "limit-experience," a rupture not only in the ideological configurations and socio-political formations that constituted Europe but also in the revolutionary measures that were installed to correct absolutism. Anticipating the radical thrusts of modernism, Romanticism announces an end, an eschaton, but also a horizon of beginnings, some horrific. (This is why its productions appeal to a range of writers as Blanchot, de Man, and Deleuze and Guattari.) In the sphere of literary performance, aesthetic experimentation in doubling, fragmentation, the image (and related issues of perspective and framing), organicism, and irony proliferates as a means of coping with the environment of radical change and od figuring it.
In seeking an overview of the aesthetic contracts of Romanticism, we will be examining the Kantian sublime, as formulated in The Critique of Judgment, and Kierdkegaardian notions of repetition and irony (culled from Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology). German pretexts to the works and achievements of British Romanticism will include Goethe's drama, Faust.
