Course I
CYBER, VIRTUAL, AND HYPERREAL CULTURES (2 credit workshop)
Stressing the need for reassessment, these three conceptual starting places and the complicated differences among them will be explored as the grounds for 'other' than the so-called real.Required Books and Reading Assignments:
Vitanza, Victor J. (ed). CyberReader. 2/e. Allyn & Bacon. Boston, August 1998, 528 pages, Paperback, ISBN: 0205290868. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
Virilio, Paul. Open Sky Verso Books, New York and London. (August 1997) 144 pages, Paperback, ISBN: 1859841813. Buy it at Amazon.com.
Course II
THE COMING COMMUNITY (3 credits)
An introduction to the political philosophy, anthropology, and aesthetics of Giorgio Agamben. A questioning of how subjectivity (agency, identity) "thwarts" a discovery of community, with special focus on "whatever beings" or "singularities."Course III
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY: PRE-PLATONIC OR PRE-SOCRATIC FRAGMENTS? (2 credit workshop)
The workshop will provide a user's guide to select fragments attributed to Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaximander, Protagoras, Zeno, and Gorgias (the older sophist) and demonstrate how Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Milan Kundera appropriated the texts differently.Required Books and Reading Assignments:
Friedrich Nietzsche, Marianne Cowan, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Paperback, 117 pages, Regnery Publishing, ISBN: 0895267101. Buy it at Amazon.com.
Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking. Paperback: 144 pages, Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers. ISBN: 0060638427. Buy it at Amazon.com.
Kundera, Milan. Immortality. Paperback, 352 pages, Perennial. ISBN: 0060932384. Buy it at Amazon.com.
Course IV
JEAN FRANCOIS LYOTARD, HESITATING THOUGHT (3 credit seminar)
The seminar will provide close readings—through an economy of hesitations—of three major works of Lyotard:
Just Gaming (with J-L Thebaud), for JRL's development of speech act theory into hesitations, or rather, deformatives, to oppose performatives, which allow Lyotard to rethink-reconfigure contemporary philosophy in terms of paganisms.
Libidinal Economy, for Lyotard's radical reconfiguration of Marx (through the perverse topological figure of a Mobius strip), creating a libidinal economic reading of Marx as a hesitant, sophistic hermaphroditic thinker (raising the question of political action becoming stalled), and
The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, for Lyotard's notion of the "differend," which is an Event of Hesitation itself within "a case of conflict, between two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments. One side's legitimacy does not imply the other's lack of legitimacy."
We will also study Laura Kipnis's Marx: A Video, sections from Werner Herzog's Where the Green Ants Dream, and from John Hancock's Bang the Drum Slowly.
Required Books and Reading Assignments:
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Just Gaming. Paperback, 128 pages, University of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 0816612773. Buy it at Amazon.com.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy. Paperback: 272 pages, Publisher: Indiana UP. ISBN: 0253207282. Buy it at Amazon.com.
Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Paperback, 195 pages, University of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 0816616116. Buy it at Amazon.com.