Seminar 1
Seminar 2
Christopher Fynsk
This seminar will have two sessions per day.
Session 1: 1:30 – 4:00 pm Paris time/7:30 am – 10 am New York time.
Session 2: 4:45 – 7:15 pm Paris time/10:45 am – 1:15 pm New York time.
Seminar 1
Seminar 2
Arrival Day
Avital Ronell
Catherine Malabou
Derrida saw Melanie Klein’s Envy and Gratitude as another Genealogy of Morals, a modern
start-up engine for questions of justice and frustrated life. Klein’s work on envy, loneliness, and her analysis of The Oresteia continues to make inroads on political theories and psychoanalytic probes motivated by questions of political aggression and the depressive position. Her crucial analyses lead up to a thinking of reparative justice, casting the relation of law, agony, and paranoia in terms of the persecutory breast or “bad object,” acts of pollution and spoilage. For essential backup and mobility, we shall read Derrida, Sarah Kofman, and Lyotard to frame Klein’s critical apparatus and the way it sets up premises of work and creativity in view of a consistent devaluation of the primal object.
How can everything start with a complication? An originary co-implication? And is “a priori synthesis” the right name for it ? Such are the fundamental questions that Derrida raises early in his first Memoir (The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy) and his Introduction to the Origin of Geometry. Are these questions still crucial in Of Grammatology and how? Such will be my leading thread. My reading will follow three main directions: 1) the elaboration of the “trace” (“l’apparaître et le fonctionnement de la différence supposent une synthèse originaire qu’aucune simplicité absolue ne précède. Telle serait donc la trace originaire ”/ “the appearing and functioning of difference presupposes an originary synthesis not preceded by any absolute simplicity.”); 2) the constitution of grammatology as a scientific project (problem of the ideal synthesis); 3) the challenging of auto-affection through the reading of Rousseau (problem of the synthetic unity of the subject).
Break Day
Elie During
Dagmawi Woubshet
Break Day
Frank Ruda & Slavoj Žižek *
Mladen Dolar & Slavoj Žižek *
Jodi Dean
Achille Mbembe
This course considers tendencies in contemporary capitalism. It considers differentiated temporalities in Marxism, changes in labor and property, and the psychotic atmosphere of rivalry and identification.
Departure Day
Seminar 1: 1:30 – 4:00 pm Paris time/7:30 am – 10 am New York time.
Seminar 2: 4:45 – 7:15 pm Paris time/10:45 am – 1:15 pm New York time.
* The students participating in the seminars of Professors Frank Ruda and Mladen Dolar will meet in those seminars for four days. The two groups will then come together for three meetings with Professor Slavoj Žižek. The scheduled seminars for Profs. Ruda and Dolar will thus run for 7 days with the participation of Slavoj Žižek in the last three segments.
Seminar 1
Seminar 2
Arrival Day
Kevin McLaughlin
In 1921 Walter Benjamin was working simultaneously on three significant and interrelated essays: “Toward the Critique of Violence,” “The Task of the Translator,” and “Goethe’s Elective Affinities.” The seminar will take this set of writings as a pivotal configuration around which to approach Benjamin’s critical work as a whole—from his more academic early writings (on Hölderlin, German romanticism, etc.) to his later essays that were directed toward a broader public—on Proust, “the storyteller” and his great unfinished study of Baudelaire from the later 1930s (including selections from The Arcades Project). We will conclude by considering the emergence out of this pivot of the problem of “popularization” as it becomes connected to the question of “theory,” specifically, “historical materialism.” Works will be read and discussed in English with attention to the German (seminar participants with knowledge of German are encouraged to read the texts in the original language).
Workshop
Workshop
Jack Halberstam
Alenka Zupančič
After elaborating the ontological anchoring of desire last year, this year’s course will focus on the epistemological, ethical and political dimensions of desire. Based on the Lacanian theory of fantasy as that which gives us access to reality, the course will pursue different ways in which desire forces us to rethink radically – rather than abandon – the subjective/objective divide. This will lead us through different figures of desire, from literature and art to philosophy and radical politics.
Departure Day
Seminar 1: 1:30 – 4:00 pm Paris time/7:30 am – 10 am New York time.
Seminar 2: 4:45 – 7:15 pm Paris time/10:45 am – 1:15 pm New York time.