Topics in Continental Philosophy (TCPS 5501h)

Topics in Continental Philosophy:

 Professor Emilia Angelova

 

Term: Winter

Time:  Monday, 10:00 - 12:00

Main Readings:
Aporias by Jacques Derrida
Strangers to Ourselves and Powers of Horror by Julia Kristeva
Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

Since the publication of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time in 1927,
ideas such as the incalculable event of Being, and with it, the temporal
character of meaning, have preoccupied German and French thinkers,
searching to articulate the difference of the “being-there” of existence
without given presuppositions. Thinking has come to be confronted with
the “impossible” present that we inhabit and the demands of a more
originary ethics that stems from it. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is
not divorced from the possibility of an ethics that exceeds normative
ethics and this is increasingly more apparent with recent work in the
aftermath of late 20th century ideas, esp. the question of the
foreigner. This course will study three representative directions of
this search in late European thought, starting with selections from
Being and Time, divisions one and two, next moving to Derrida’s Aporias,
and concluding with Kristeva’s middle period of Powers of Horror and
Strangers to Ourselves. We will work closely with text to see how, since
Heidegger, it is no longer possible to be subject to experience as
properly mine, including “my death,” and yet how, under a different
notion, the transcendence of being nevertheless remains closest to me
and most properly “mine,” the resolute openness of a “freedom” that is
freed up, but that there is neither pure life nor pure death. Derrida’s
own work—a critique and as well appropriation of Heidegger’s ideas—will
attune us to the “aporetical” obligation to the foreigner at our
borders, the very difference of “the trace” (écriture) that is the
paradigm of being-with and encountering the other. We conclude as we
turn to Kristeva’s astonishing insight into the “abject” with which the
foreign and the foreigner, and death as a figure of the foreign itself,
continue to maintain the “ambiguity” of inherently mobile borders
between impure and pure, semiotic and symbolic, and nature and culture.
With this last part we take up questions of psychological and
psychoanalytic theorizations of death and the other, and the precarious
promise issued at our borders and unstable boundaries, for possible
transformations of aesthetics (the experiences of a more radical
sensibility) into an ethics.