Passions – Alenka Zupančič

Taking into account the double-sidedness of passion, its swaying between passive and active, between cold and burning, between solitude and bonding, the seminar will navigate among different faces and paradoxes of passion, which are also of some philosophical interest. It will take its staring point in an ancient figure of a controversial passion, Antigone, and look at her contemporary revivals (for example Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire). It will also look into some other contemporary forms of passion, and into their relationship to what Freud called “beyond the pleasure principle”. Within the perspective of these general interrogation the seminar will also address several particular questions, such as questions of kinship, of violence, of power and of sexuality. Another key focus of the seminar will the question (and narrative) of the “End”, of its different figures and of the passions it arouses. We’ll be looking (critically) into the notions of the “end of history” and the “end of ideology”, and into how they contrast with the notion of the “end of the world”, which seems be making its way back to the fore of our imaginary. 

What Is Authority? On Authority Related Matters – Mladen Dolar

Authority is a tricky concept. To follow Hannah Arendt – the title of the seminar is borrowed from her classical essay – what defines the proper domain of authority is a double negative: it cannot be reduced to the use of external means of coercion and violence, and on the other hand it is also irreducible to persuasion, argument and reasoning. Authority is thus exerted at the point with no proper coverage in either force or reason, yet it is not simply external to either and can be conceived at the point of their inner intersection. The traditional way of dealing with this paradoxical entity was to base authority in transcendence, and the advent of modernity was coterminous with the downfall of all traditional authorities and their reduction to immanence. Hence the predicament of modernity, the impossibility of establishing a proper authority (“authority has vanished from the modern world,” says Arendt) and the propensity to set up ersatz authorities, often with calamitous consequences. Several vocabularies can be used to circumscribe the locus of authority, and the seminar will take up some classical approaches and clues, without the ambition to be exhaustive: from La Boétie’s path-breaking manifesto on voluntary servitude (around 1550), a harbinger of modernity, to Carl Schmitt’s reflections on sovereignty, followed by Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. It will address the very modern problem of the authority of reason that should be sustained on its own grounds, from Kant’s path-breaking set-up of the Enlightenment to the contemporary proponents continuing on that path (Brandom, Pinker etc.). Finally, it will try to shed light on the problem of authority from a psychoanalytic perspective, through the lens of what Freud designated as the three impossible professions: governance, education and psychoanalysis. All three are impossible precisely because they have the problem of authority at their core, something that is impossible to sustain and at the same time something impossible to be rid of.

Passions – Alenka Zupančič

Taking into account the double-sidedness of passion, its swaying between passive and active, between cold and burning, between solitude and bonding, the seminar will navigate among different faces and paradoxes of passion, which are also of some philosophical interest. It will take its staring point in an ancient figure of a controversial passion, Antigone, and look at her contemporary revivals (for example Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire). It will also look into some other contemporary forms of passion, and into their relationship to what Freud called “beyond the pleasure principle”. Within the perspective of these general interrogation the seminar will also address several particular questions, such as questions of kinship, of violence, of power and of sexuality. Another key focus of the seminar will the question (and narrative) of the “End”, of its different figures and of the passions it arouses. We’ll be looking (critically) into the notions of the “end of history” and the “end of ideology”, and into how they contrast with the notion of the “end of the world”, which seems be making its way back to the fore of our imaginary. 

What Is Authority? On Authority Related Matters – Mladen Dolar

Authority is a tricky concept. To follow Hannah Arendt – the title of the seminar is borrowed from her classical essay – what defines the proper domain of authority is a double negative: it cannot be reduced to the use of external means of coercion and violence, and on the other hand it is also irreducible to persuasion, argument and reasoning. Authority is thus exerted at the point with no proper coverage in either force or reason, yet it is not simply external to either and can be conceived at the point of their inner intersection. The traditional way of dealing with this paradoxical entity was to base authority in transcendence, and the advent of modernity was coterminous with the downfall of all traditional authorities and their reduction to immanence. Hence the predicament of modernity, the impossibility of establishing a proper authority (“authority has vanished from the modern world,” says Arendt) and the propensity to set up ersatz authorities, often with calamitous consequences. Several vocabularies can be used to circumscribe the locus of authority, and the seminar will take up some classical approaches and clues, without the ambition to be exhaustive: from La Boétie’s path-breaking manifesto on voluntary servitude (around 1550), a harbinger of modernity, to Carl Schmitt’s reflections on sovereignty, followed by Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. It will address the very modern problem of the authority of reason that should be sustained on its own grounds, from Kant’s path-breaking set-up of the Enlightenment to the contemporary proponents continuing on that path (Brandom, Pinker etc.). Finally, it will try to shed light on the problem of authority from a psychoanalytic perspective, through the lens of what Freud designated as the three impossible professions: governance, education and psychoanalysis. All three are impossible precisely because they have the problem of authority at their core, something that is impossible to sustain and at the same time something impossible to be rid of.

Through a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s major work, we will try to put his definition of the body schema in perspective with contemporary visions of the body in neuroscience, psychoanalysis and critical theory/philosophy.

The seminar will address critical issues underlying the contemporary imagination of spaceflight by following a particular thread: the experience of microgravity (or “zero-G”) considered as a spiritual exercise, a gnostic discipline or subdomain of what Blumenberg wittingly described as “astronoetics”. In the context of a massive revival of interest in the ecological and political challenges raised by space exploration and the prospects of extraterrestrial colonization, such an inquiry into the philosophical meaning of orbital weightlessness requires a special blend of gravity and playfulness, literality and abstraction. We will be navigating between case studies taken from the abundant literature on the human aspects of astronautics (astronauts’ biographies, sci-fi novels, neuroscientific studies of non-gravitational experience), and a hefty collection of theoretical works (from Plessner to Sloterdijk and Latour) dealing with the wider metaphysical and anthropological significance of the “Space Age”. Here the focus will be on the specific problems posed by the emergence of homo ingravitus as a plausible paradigm for the future evolution of the human species. We will try to substantiate the following claim: at the heart of the matter is a certain transformation of the gaze heralded and prefigured by a series of experimentations in the field of visual and performing arts, from Malevich to recent explorations of holographic space and the sensorium of the expanded body. Briefly stated, what is at stake is a floating gaze emancipated from the very notion of viewpoint. This does not require that we embrace vast expanses of space, nor that we yield to the melancholy of “Earthrises”: the so-called “overview effect” can be achieved at home as much as on board the ISS by reflecting, for example, on neuropsychological findings about multi-stable perception, or the use of axonometric projection in architectural drawing. When it comes to realizing an “orbital view” of our current condition, zero-G and its terrestrial counterparts function like magnifying lenses. They may also help us reach a better understanding of what is at stake in the cosmic pessimism expressing itself in much of the philosophical literature on space exploration.

The seminar itself being a multistage rocket of sorts, it will stack several launching components on top of each other, and most likely use them in parallel in order to reach escape velocity. We may also describe these components as “modules,” provided that they are not considered as self-contained units.

What comes before, or perhaps after, the I, and what is the link between this and drives: Eros and Thanatos?

The course will explore the implications of various literary works for the history of philosophy. Works discussed will include: 17^th– and 18^th-century Cartesian and Spinozistic novels by G. Daniel and Simon Tyssot de Patot; 18^th-century erotic novels Thérèse Philosophe (1748) by d’Argens [?], and The Indiscreet Jewels (1748) by Diderot; two materialist novels Rameau’s Nephew (1774) and Jacques the Fatalist (1778) by Diderot, and his philosophical comedy D’Alembert’s Dream (1769); Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1889). Some of these works discover the most abstract and sublime metaphysical principles in entirely ordinary, everyday situations, that is, the principles for which even the thinkers who first established them were not always able to provide convincing examples. Other works try to answer the question: What might philosophy have been like in certain most distant and inaccessible eras of human history? Still other works raise the question: What sort of philosophical theory would have been likely to arise in the mind conscious of its departure from the body in the fleeting moment of death? Furthermore, some works tackle the question: What sort of metaphysical theory would be developed by the mind after its separation from the body, that is, in the long centuries of its disembodied existence? And, finally, some literary works constitute, in their own right, new and previously unknown chapters in the history of philosophy. In short, in the light of these literary works, the history of philosophy as we know it would have to be substantially revised if not entirely rewritten.

In this seminar, we will revisit the concept of “necropolitics” forged in 2003 in the aftermath of 9/11. We will follow its multiple receptions in various contexts and examine the ways in which it has been deployed in various disciplines. We will finally assess its explanatory and interpretive potential in the context of the ongoing Covid-19 epidemic and its associated demand for a “universal right to breathe”.

Alternative Ecologies, Alternative Economies (Alter-Eco) – Christopher Fynsk, Sha Xin Wei, et al.

Sarah Nutall and Achille Mbembe

Judith Butler – Morning

Karen Barad

Peter Szendy