Summer School 2025

10 courses taught Jan - Feb

The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy is proud to present the Summer School 2025 curriculum.  All courses are 10 hours in length.  As always significant discounts apply for those enrolling in multiple courses. If you have any questions which aren't in our FAQs please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Summer Programme

 

Course Descriptions

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Taking on Another’s World: Encountering Others and Aesthetic Artefacts in Merleau-Ponty

Lecturers: George Wood, Kelly Herbison

This course will consider the way Merleau-Ponty answers the questions of how we engage with both other subjects and aesthetic artefacts. Though focussing on either one of these issues would be worthwhile, they are mutually illuminating in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, not least because of his tendency to invoke examples from one of these domains when discussing the other. We will begin by getting our footing in Merleau-Ponty’s early works and thought, establishing how he thinks embodied subjects express themselves and engage with one another. From here, we will consider his suggestion that artistic gesture is a particularly revelatory mode of expression, a thought we find throughout both his early and later writings. We will then consider how this theory of expressive activity and our receptivity to it can help us think about various phenomena in the interpersonal and aesthetic domains, beyond those that Merleau-Ponty explicitly discusses. 

Please note: this course will dedicate a decent portion of each lecture to discussion, and so will encourage participation from attendees.

Lecture 1: The Structure of Embodiment 

The first lecture will briefly introduce Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual context, as well as the authors and intellectual movements that he (and phenomenology more generally) was both influenced by and situating itself against. Having sketched the general shape of phenomenology’s territory, we will then consider key aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s major contribution to phenomenology, namely, the theory of the embodied subject. To this end, we will focus on his early works The Structure of Behaviour and the Phenomenology of Perception.

Required reading:

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motricity.” In Phenomenology of Perception, translated by David Landes, 100–148. Routledge, 2012.

Recommended reading: 

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Structure of Behaviour. Translated by Alden L. Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. 129-137

Lecture 2: Intersubjectivity and Expression

This lecture will begin by sketching out different approaches to intersubjectivity that exist within the phenomenological and existential traditions. From here, we will begin unpacking Merleau-Ponty’s own theory of intersubjective engagements and their possibility. Again, this will largely draw on the Phenomenology. To begin thinking about the plausibility of this story, we will also discuss his essay The Child’s Relation with Others and ask what kind of pre-linguistic space this story might be at risk of assuming. To temper this proposal, we will turn to how other authors have responded to this concern on his behalf more recently. 

Required reading:

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Body as Expression, and Speech.” In Phenomenology of Perception, translated by David Landes, 179–205. Routledge, 2012.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.  “Others and the Human World.” In Phenomenology of Perception, translated by David Landes, 361–84. Routledge, 2012.

Recommended reading:

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Child’s Relation with Others.” In The Primacy of Perception, 96–155. Northwestern University Press, 1964.
• Gallagher, Shaun, and Andrew N. Meltzoff. “The Earliest Sense of Self and Others: Merleau-Ponty and Recent Developmental Studies.” Philosophical Psychology 9, no. 2 (March 1, 1996): 211–33.https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089608573181.

Lecture 3: Taking on the Artist (and Other’s) World

Having established the structure of embodied activity and intersubjective encounters, we will turn to the question of aesthetic engagement. This lecture will draw mostly on Cezanne’s Doubt, which will expose us to the (potentially) radical claims that Merleau-Ponty is making about the disclosive power of aesthetic conduct. Some questions that arise are: what is the relationship between the expressive gesture and the whole life from which it emerges? What are the enabling and constraining factors that allow us to access the other’s world? Our response we will consider recent contributions from critical phenomenology.

Required reading: 

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Cézanne’s Doubt.” In Sense and Non-Sense, 9–25. Northwestern University Press, 1964.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “On the Phenomenology of Language.” In Signs, 84–97. Northwestern University Press, 1964.

Recommended reading: 

• ‘Freedom and Others’, Phenomenology of Perception, 466-484

Lecture 4: Expressive Invitations and Style

This lecture will focus on the essays Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence and Eye and Mind, which present Merleau-Ponty’s most thoroughgoing exploration of the expressive force of artistic (specifically, painterly) activity. We will here consider some questions from more classic aesthetic theory and think about how we might answer them, based on what is presented in both these texts and the materials that we have so far read. For instance: how is it that we grasp movement in the still work? In what does an artist’s style consist? 

Required reading:

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” In Signs, 39–83. Northwestern University Press, 1964.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” In The Primacy of Perception, 159–90. Northwestern University Press, 1964.

Lecture 5: Where to?

This final lecture will be divided into two parts, with the first being more critical in focus and the second aiming to extend Merleau-Ponty’s thought. First, we will compare Merleau-Ponty’s position with other approaches in response to which he was writing Indirect Language (at least in part: e.g., Sartre’s views on prose as being able to communicate meaning directly; Malraux’s views on artistic style). Here we will think about whether Merleau-Ponty’s position is a compelling alternative to these other views. The second portion of the lecture will be spent thinking about how concepts that we have gleaned from this course (e.g., ‘style’) can allow us to describe more complex interpersonal and aesthetic phenomena that Merleau-Ponty himself left undescribed, though was clearly interested in. 

Required reading:

• Sartre, Jean-Paul. “What Is Writing?” In What Is Literature?, translated by David Caute, 1–26. Routledge, 2001.

Recommended reading:

• Murphy, Ann. “The Spirited Interworld: Caregiving and the Liminal Phenomenology of Dementia.” Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology 7, no.1 (2024): 57-68.
• Ratcliffe, Matthew. “Towards a Phenomenology of Grief: Insights from Merleau-Ponty.” European Journal of Philosophy 28, no. 3 (2020): 657–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12513.

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Introduction to the work of Jean Hyppolite

Lecturer: Alice Nilsson

This course offers an introduction to the oft forgotten work of historian of philosophy Jean Hyppolite. Jean Hyppolite’s work on Hegel—despite being overshadowed by Kojevé’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel—had a significant impact upon the post-war French reception of Hegel, and French philosophy more broadly. In stark contrast to Alexandre Kojevé, Hyppolite stresses the importance of both substance and subject even from his early work. In reading Hyppolite, we find a rich moment of Hegel scholarship in France which tends to lie outside of the usual interpretations of the ‘French Hegel’. The course is structured broadly chronologically in order to sketch the development of Hyppolite’s thought from Genesis and Structure to his post-Logic and Existence writings—especially on the question of the relation between the Phenomenology and the Logic.

N.B. Readings for each week are not strictly required, but are the main texts which will be referenced.

Lecture 1: The French Hegel and Hyppolite’s Genesis and Structure

The first week will introduce the concept of the ‘French Hegel’ and intellectual context of Hyppolite’s work. It will also  introduce Hyppolite’s reading of  the method and structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology, and how Hyppolite understands the relation between the Phenomenology and Logic—in 1946—through his reading of Hegel’s chapter on Absolute Knowledge. 

Readings: 

• Jean Hyppolite, ‘Generalities on The Phenomenology’ (in particular ‘Meaning and Method of the Phenomenology’ and ‘History and Phenomenology’), and ‘Phenomenology and Logic: Absolute Knowledge’ in Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974)
• G.W.F. Hegel, ‘Preface’ and ‘Absolute Knowing’ in The Phenomenology of Spirit tr. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) pp. 3-48, 454-467
• Judith Butler, ‘Hyppolite: Desire, Transcience, and the Absolute’ in Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp.79-92
• Michael S. Roth, ‘Heroic Hegelianism’ in Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 19-45

Lecture 2: Hyppolite’s ‘Middle Period’

In week two, we will focus upon Hyppolite’s work between the publication of Genesis and Structure and Logic and Existence. The first half of this lecture will focus on how Hyppolite reads the concept of ‘history’ in Hegel, and Marx’s response to Hegel—particularly through Hegel’s political philosophy. The second half of this lecture will focus on Hyppolite’s writing on the relation between the Phenomenology and the Logic in this period wherein we find early indications of the account that will be more fully developed in Logic and Existence. In turn, we will examine how Hyppolite’s writings on the Phenomenology-Logic relation problematise the notion of history found in his earlier readings of the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right.

Readings:

• Jean Hyppolite, ‘Ruse of Reason and History in Hegel’ (Translation will be provided)
• Jean Hyppolite, ‘Marx’s Critique of the Hegelian Concept of the State’, ‘The Human Situation in the Hegelian Phenomenology’, and ‘On the Logic of Hegel’ in Studies on Hegel and Marx pp. 106-125, 153-168, 169-186
• Michael S. Roth, ‘Logic in History and the Problematic of Humanism’ in Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 46-65

Lecture 3: The ‘Heideggerian Thunderbolt’ and Logic and Existence

Hyppolite, like many French philosophers of the period, was struck by the ‘Heideggerian thunderbolt’ in the wake of the publication of Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’. By turning to Hyppolite’s writings on Heidegger, we can see the lines of thought that structured his work during the period he was writing Logic and Existence (L&E) and immediately after. In particular, reading Hyppolite’s work on Heidegger allows us reflect on the movement of Hyppolite’s thought from Genesis and Structure, and the essays collected in Studies on Hegel and Marx to his more Heidegger-inspired reading in L&E in regards to the question of the ‘relation’ between Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic. Hyppolite’s conclusions from his engagement with Heidegger and Hegel also allows us to distinguish him from Kojeve through his refusal of a ‘subjectivist’ reading of Hegel—which in turn will be important for students of Hyppolite such as Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida.

Readings:

• Jean Hyppolite, ‘Ontology and Phenomenology in Martin Heidegger’ (Translation will be provided)
• Jean Hyppolite, ‘Study of Heidegger’s Commentary on the Introduction to the Phenomenology (Translation will be provided)
• Jean Hyppolite, ‘The Transformation of Metaphysics into Logic’, and ‘Logic and Existence’ in Logic and Existence, tr. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997)
• Ethan Kleinberg, ‘The “Letter on Humanism” in Generation Existentential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-1961 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005) pp.184-206

Lecture 4: Post-Logic and Existence

In week four we will turn to Hyppolite’s later writings, and Geroulanos and Roth’s reading of them. In particular, we will focus on the reading of Roth and Geroulanos in which Hyppolite is a ‘hopeful Heideggerian’ and ‘ambiguous’ about the relation of Man and his role in history, which will be problematised through reading Hyppolite’s remarks on Althusser and Balibar’s Reading Capital.

Readings:

• Jean Hyppolite, ‘Language and Being: Language and Thought’ and ‘A New Perspective on Marx and Marxism’ in Pli Vol 24, pp. 10-39
• Stefanos Geroulanos, ‘Man in Suspension: Jean Hyppolite on History, Being, and Language’ in An Atheism That is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 287-304
• Michael S. Roth, ‘From Humanism to Being’ in Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 66-80 

Lecture 5: Hyppolite and his After-lives

In week 5, we move from Hyppolite to his reception and influence in France. The first part of this lecture will focus on the influence of Hyppolite on his students—in particular Deleuze, and to a lesser extent, Foucault—before turning to his reception by those who could be considered his contemporaries in the field of Philosophy of Science, such as Georges Canguilhem and Suzanne Bachelard. 

Readings: 

• Gilles Deleuze, ‘Review of Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence’ in Logic and Existence, tr. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997)
• Leonard Lawlor, ‘“If theory Is Gray, Green Is the Golden Tree of Life”: Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hyppolite’ in Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003) pp. 11-23
• Joe Huges, Christopher O’Neill, Lachlan Wells, and Alice Nilsson, ‘Homage to the ‘Homage to the Hommage à Jean Hyppolite’’, Philosophy, Politics and Critique, Vol 1, Issue 3, pp. 344-38
• Stuart Elden, ‘Canguilhem, Dumézil, Hyppolite: Georges Canguilhem and his Contemporaries’, Revue Internationationale de Philosophie, 307.1 (2024), 27-48. 
• Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault ‘Jean Hyppolite (1907-1968)’, Pli Vol 24, pp.1-9
• Leonard Lawlor, ‘“Immanence is Complete” or the Legacy of Jean Hyppolite’s Thinking’ (Translation will be provided)

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Wittgenstein, Language, Madness: Reading Philosophical Investigations §§1-242

Lecturer: RG Smith

In this course we will embark on a slow/close reading of sections 1-242 of Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophical Investigations’. Resisting technologically-driven imperatives to skim, scan and select, the intention here will be to engage the first part of Wittenstein’s major mature work directly and unhurriedly, with no required secondary texts (although suggestions will be offered). The order of reading and explication will follow Wittenstein’s long-deliberated structure. Wittgenstein’s later work is focussed on language-in-application, and has had a major influence on modern conceptions of language outside of philosophy as much as within. Some of the implications of this influence for recent approaches to language studies will be glancingly considered, and, in line with the ‘application’ approach, meaning-idiosyncracies of psychosis will be referenced as illustrative at certain key points. However, a direct and contemplative reading of the early sections of the ‘Investigations’ as primary source will remain the central focus.

Required text: 

Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe & P. M. S. Hacker, Trans.; Revised fourth). Wiley-Blackwell. (Original work published 1953)

recommended reading:

Baker, G. P., & Hacker, P. M. S. (1980). Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning, An Analytical Commentary on the ‘Philosophical Investigations’,  Essays and Exegesis 1-184. Blackwell.

Baker, G. P., & Hacker, P. M. S. (2014). Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity: Volume 2 of an Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, Essays and Exegesis 185-242. John Wiley & Sons.

Monk, R. (1991). Ludwig Wittgenstein: The duty of genius . Vintage 

Sass, L. (1994). The paradoxes of delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber and the schizophrenic mind. Cornell University Press.

Schroeder, S. (2006). Wittgenstein: The Way Out of the Fly-bottle. Polity.

Waismann, F. (1968). The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy (R. Harré, Ed.). Macmillan.

Week 1:

Introduction

Returning to the source / close reading

A word on secondary sources

–      will be kept to a minimum (e.g., introductory texts)

–      recommendations only (not required reading)

–      organisational sections will chiefly follow Baker & Hacker.

Presenter’s background: philosophy/psychiatry/linguistics

Psychosis as meaning-disruption (phenomena of language)

Wittgenstein and Madness — points of contact

Wittgenstein’s ‘task of philosophy’

–      ‘showing/shooing’ a fly

‘Ways of proceeding’ (unmethodical methods)

Comments on style

–      interlocutor; setup + undermine (a ‘philosophical joke’)

–      ‘Criss-cross’ method/style ‘connected with the very nature of the investigation’

Scope of this course: First half of Part I of PI, §§1-242

What we will miss

–      private language (§243-271/315)

–      Part II: ‘Notes on Psychology’

Housekeeping

Historical context and biographical comments:

–      Russell, Frege

–      The Theory of Types

–      Logical Atomism

–      Tractatus

–      ‘turning’ from the Tractatan view (gesture/multi-modal signing)

Metaphors as ‘Conceptual Device’ (a preview)

–      holographic (non-linear) method

–      tool-box

–      standard metre

–      indicators/indexicals

–      internal relations (chepakatov cone)

PI reading §§1-67 — (key concepts in bold)

• § 1-27,  Augustinian View of Language

–      ‘Games’: Five Red Apples; block-pillar-slab-beam

–      meaning-in-use

–      the picture view

–      language games

–      indexicality

–      the number series / necessity /internal relations

–      what does it mean to signify?

–      heterogeneity of language / ‘toolbox conceptual’ device

–      the ‘ancient city’ of language (language as complex system)

(§§26-88, ‘logical atomism’ )

• §26-64, naming / ostensive definition / simples, samples & analysis

–      relation between naming and use (§§26-31)

–      ostensive definition (§§28-31)

–      ways/forms of life—the anthropological perspective (§30)

–      ‘this’ and ‘that’ are not names (§38)

–      atomic simples and naming (§39)

–      correspondence vs meaning-in-use (§43)

–      parts/wholes/internal relations (§§47-48)

–      names are not descriptions (just as indexicals are not names) (§49)

–      the standard meter (conceptual device)

–      Grammar = ‘rules’ of the language game (§53)

–      considerations on ‘point’

• §65-67 the general form of proposition

–      ‘the great question’: ‘general forms’ of proposition or language (§65)

–      ‘don’t think, but look’ / indexicality (§66)

–      family resemblance (§67) 

Week 2:

 Review of key terms from week 1

• §68-75 borders, ostensive definitions, schemas

–      borders of concepts

–      prototypes

–      ostensive definition

–      conceptual schemas

• §76-88, Rules, context, indicators

–      exactness / the sharp and the blurred 

–      logic & language

–      knowing how to go on

–      rules in context, as dynamic, as signpost; necessity

–      indeterminacy of the sign / infinite deferral of meaning

–      signpost: point  and purpose

–      exactness as an ideal, as a form of praise 

• §89-133 ‘Philosophy’

–      logic as sublime or essence 

–      Obect of enquiry: the grammatical form of possibilities. 

–      Language is not the one thing

–      trying to remedy inexactness (indexicality)

–      general form of the proposition

–      thought & language as picture (unique correlate) of the world; 

–      The mundanity of ‘deep’ philosophical concepts. 

–      games permit vagueness in the rules

–      neccessity and the different ways that ‘must’ can mean

–      grammatical structure =  a pair of glasses on our nose...  

–      One predicates of the thing what lies in the mode of representation 

–      internal relations between ‘proposition’, ‘language’, ‘fact’? 

–      What is a word?’ — ‘what is a piece in chess?’

–      language/thinking agglomeration

–      TLP  ‘this is how things are’ as the general form of propositions

–      the picture view

–       bringing words back from their metaphysical sense to their everyday use

–      the money and the cow you can buy with it 

–      seeing connexions 

–      now I know how to go on

–      language games... as ‘objects of comparison’ which, through similarities and dissimilarities elucidate our use of language (130)

–      aim: a lucidity (whereby) philosophical problems completely disappear

Week 3:

• §134-142 the general propositional form

–      ‘this is how things are’ = propositional schema; 

–      ‘picture’ vs use — ‘two ways’ of determining meaning

–      picture (as meaning); picture vs use (139)

–      picture → use as necessity/rule?

–      loss of normativity → loss of point in the language game

• §143-184 Meaning and Understanding

–      understanding as ‘essential’, sign as ‘inessential

–      meaning as mental phenomena

–      understanding as a state, process, activity or experience

–      understanding and ability

–      understanding as a family resemblance concept

Week 4:

• §185-202 accord with a rule, mastery of techniques & practices

–      accord between language and reality

–      interpretation, ‘fitting’, grammar

–      following a rule

–      practices and techniques

–      privacy and community view

–      innate knowledge of language?

Week 5:

• §203-242 Agreement in definitions, judgements and forms of life
• §238-242 Grammar and necessity 
• §1-242 overview/ whole course review

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The Metaphysical System in Kant, Heidegger, Derrida and Nancy

Lecturer: Terrence Thomson

The aim of this course is to introduce participants/students to the history of modern European philosophy by tracing the idea of the metaphysical system in Kant, Heidegger, Derrida and Nancy. An experimental course in nature, we will start in an unorthodox way by reading the much under-studied last part of Critique of Pure Reason called the Architectonic of Pure Reason. The course focuses on how Kant’s thinking of the distribution of a metaphysical system is received as an invitation to “destroy” the history of metaphysics in Heidegger and to “de(con)struct” it in Derrida and Nancy. The course will engage this topic under a number of different rubrics: Kant’s reception of previous metaphysical systems (such as Wolff’s and Baumgarten’s); the role of the idea in Kant (how the idea at the root of the system is regulative or asymptotic); Heidegger’s reception of Kant’s engagement with metaphysica specialis and metaphysica generalis; Heidegger’s equation of metaphysics and ontology deriving from his reading of Critique of Pure Reason; Derrida’s reception of Kant and the parergon, the supplement and annexation of a future system; Nancy’s reading of Kant’s problem with the metaphysical system as a problem of presentation (Darstellung).

Week 1 

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. A Preface (Avii-xxii); B Preface (Bvii-xliv); Architectonic of Pure Reason (A832-851/B860-879). 

[I’ll be using the Guyer and Wood—Cambridge University Press—translation, but the Norman Kemp Smith translation will be fine as well]

We will explore and unpack Kant’s overarching question, “how is metaphysics possible as a science?” This will lead us into a discussion of the system of metaphysics by way of a close-reading of the Architectonic of Pure Reason.

         Supplemental reading:

+ Kant, “What Real Progress has Metaphysics Made in Germany Since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?”

+ Morgan, Kant Trouble. Chapter 2 (pp.106-139).

Week 2

Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Introduction; §1; §2 (pp.7-27). 

We will read Heidegger’s unpacking of traditional metaphysics (metaphysica specialis, metaphysica generalis). This leads into his centralization of the act of Grundlegung or “ground-laying” of metaphysics as a science, which leads into his distinction between a system of regional ontology (study of ontic beings at the level of presence) and fundamental ontology (an ontology of the ontic [the Being of beings] at the level of possibility).

Supplemental reading:

+ Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, Part A, Section 2 and 3 (pp.22-42).

Week 3

Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. §3; §4 (pp.27-52).

We’ll discuss Heidegger’s thematization the problem of ontology, which is connected to the role of synthetic a priori knowledge in the Grundlegung. This plays into what Heidegger refers to as the transcendence of Dasein (ekstasis). We will explore the question, “why is laying the ground for metaphysics called ‘critique of pure reason’”?, which takes us back to the problem of naming (and/or housing) found in the architectonic. Ultimately, we end by discussing the quote, “The time of systems is over” (Contributions to Philosophy, p.4) and how Kant marks the point at which the system can only ever be hoped for, never delivered. This further propels us forward into the de(con)structions undertaken by Derrida and Nancy.

Supplemental reading:

         + Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Part One (pp.3-12).

Week 4

Derrida, The Truth in Painting. The Parergon, Part II. The Parergon (pp.37-82).

We’ll explore the frame in Kant’s third Critique and the framing of nothing. By reading Derrida closely we can draw out the relationship between the work (ergon) and the supplement (parergon) with regards to our previous discussions on Kant and the system. Kant’s system is supposed to be a work, a book (a beautiful book) but instead frames nothing; it is caught up always in the Architectonic – the nothing as an absent text called Metaphysics of Nature. This calls upon us to make a somewhat immanent move from critique (or what critique names) to de(con)struction.

         Supplemental reading:

         +Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, Introduction (5:171-198).

         + Harvey, “Derrida, Kant, and the Performance of Parergonality” in Kant and

Deconstruction (pp.57-74).

Week 5

Nancy, The Discourse of the Syncope, §3 (pp.22-45)

In this final week we’ll read Nancy on Kant. Specifically, we’ll unpack the idea that the problem is presentation (Darstellung) which is identical to the problem of philosophy. The properly “philosophical” system cannot be presented and is therefore absent. We are left with some stubborn decisions: transcendental philosophy and literature? System or rhapsody?

         Supplemental Reading

+ Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, The Literary Absolute. Overture: The System-Subject (pp.27-37).

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Introduction to the thought of Jacques Derrida

Lecturer: Jon Roffe

Jacques Derrida remains a touchpoint in contemporary philosophy, though often as a denegatory, even derisory, figure – nihilist, relativist, postmodernist, obscurantist. 

None of these terms touches what makes Derrida such an important thinker. This course is designed as an introduction, to orient us so that we can engage with his work more honestly and philosophically. 

The course, a survey of the whole sequence of his publications, will work through a number of Derrida’s key concerns: writing and the deconstruction of Western metaphysics, metaphor and translation, ethics and alterity, politics and autoimmunity.

First lecture. Introducing Derrida and deconstruction

After providing a brief biographical sketch, this lecture will present a broad overview of what deconstruction means for Derrida. We will consider the breakthrough deconstruction of Husserl from Speech and Phenomena, and the way Derrida parlays the commitments of Saussurean linguistics into the theory of the trace, gram or différance.

Readings

• “Deconstruction and the Other” (1984)
• “Semiology and Grammatology,” Positions (1981), pp. 15-36 

Second lecture. Texts, contexts, signatures, events

The second lecture will focus on Derrida's essay 'Signature Event Context'. Not only does this essay provide a summary account of the problems faced by all attempts to ground a metaphysics of presence, it also provides us with a way of properly understanding the infamous assertion made in Of Grammatology: 'there is nothing outside of the text'. Reading this text will also give us a way to understand the paradoxical relationship between singularity and repetition that is found throughout Derrida's work.

Readings

• “Signature Event Context,” Margins of Philosophy (1982), pp. 307-30
• Extract from Of Grammatology (1974), pp. 6-15

Third lecture. Philosophy, translation, literature and architecture

The third lecture concerns Derrida's account of the relationship between philosophy and art; our focus will be specifically on literature, painting and architecture. In the first hour, we will approach the question of philosophy's relationship with literature via detours on metaphor and translation. In the second hour, we'll take up The Truth in Painting, and the analysis of Peter Eisenman's Parc de la Villette in Paris. 

• “This Strange Institution Called Literature” (interview, 1989)
• "Point de foie - maintenant l'architecture" (1985)
• Extract from “The Double Session,” in Dissemination (1981), pp. 184-93
• Extract from “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference (1978), pp. 91-2

Fourth lecture.  Ethics, beginning from the Other 

From the start, Derrida's writing is concerned with alterity and the insistence of the Other in every formation of the Same. In this lecture, we'll consider the nature of this ongoing engagement. The starting point will be the remarks on ethnocentrism that open Of Grammatology. We will then touch on a number of key places where the figure of the Other plays a central role in Derrida's work, before turning to the paradoxes of hospitality.

Our focus in the second hour will be the important text 'Force of Law', which presents three aporiae that attend the possibility of justice and being just. 

• “Pas d’hospitalité”, On Hospitality (2000)
• "Force of Law: 'The Mystical Foundations of Authority'" (1992)

Fifth lecture. Democracy to come

This final lecture will focus on politics, and specifically the idea of democracy. We will begin by discussing Spectres of Marx, which constitutes a lengthy engagement with Marx's work. We will then turn to discuss three elements that surround the democratic political ideal: sovereignty, the death penalty, and the function of autoimmunity.

• Extract from Spectres of Marx (1994)
• Extract from Rogues (2005)

Difficulty: Intermediate. While this course is an introduction, Derrida's work is challenging. Patience with his work is rewarded, but it is also demanded.

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Corridor of Mirrors: Perceiving algorithmic behaviour patterns through Rene Girard’s mimetic theory

Lecturer: Kalenga Leon Kalumba

This course will investigate Rene Girard’s mimetic theory and its relevance to the internet age. Concrete examples of this relevance abound, with Peter Thiel having claimed that Girardian thought motivated his initial investment in Facebook. Through Girard’s mimetic theory, we will explore whether individuals know what they desire or if they obtain their desires through mimesis (imitation). For Girard, imitation is central to society's functioning and tends to escalate to sacrificial violence. The objective of this course is to apply Girardian theory to our current predicament and to assess whether it allows us the opportunity to reverse our algorithmic thought processes, and additionally to beg the ontological question of what distinguishes our material biological form from our digital avatars: collections of data that exist in the virtual (immaterial) plane.

Lecture 1: Mimetic Theory

Introductory lecture on Girard’s mimetic theory and what the theory draws from myths, religious practices and literature.

Readings: 

• Girard, René. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Girard, René, Jean-Michel Oughourlian, and Guy Lefort. 1987. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. London: Continuum.

Lecture 2: Mimetic Desire

This lecture will more deeply explore Girard’s notion of mimetic desire. Here the focus will be on his understanding of mimesis. We will look at how Girard asserts a triune composition of mimetic desire between subject, model and object.

Readings: 

• Girard, René, Jean-Michel Oughourlian, and Guy Lefort. 1987. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. London: Continuum.
• Girard, René. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lecture 3: The Scape Goat Mechanism

This lecture will investigate Girard’s “scapegoat mechanism”, and ask whether it is central to the functioning of every group. For Girard, ritualistic violence of this mechanism is an inevitable end to the tension produced by Mimetic Desire. 

Readings: 

• Girard, René, and Yvonne Freccero. 1986. The Scapegoat. London: Athlone Press.
• Girard, René, Jean-Michel Oughourlian, and Guy Lefort. 1987. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. London: Continuum.

Lecture 4: Imatio Christi

This lecture will explore Girard’s theological solution and his critique of modernity concerning the Christian message through his proposition of a ‘contrasting’ culture.

Readings: 

• Girard, René, Jean-Michel Oughourlian, and Guy Lefort. 1987. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. London: Continuum.
• Girard, René. 1977. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lecture 5: Girard’s eschatology

The final lecture will focus on Girard’s reading of our current time as apocalyptic, and to a Girardian understanding of apocalypse. 

Readings: 

• Girard, René, Jean-Michel Oughourlian, and Guy Lefort. 1987. Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. London: Continuum.
• Girard, René. 2004. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Translated by James G. Williams. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books; Ottawa: Novalis.

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Putting the Psycho Back in Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud, Lou Salomé and Sabina Spielrein

Lecturer: Vincent Lê

While biographers have often observed that Lou Salomé and Sabina Spielrein played a part in Freud’s personal life, their intellectual influence and important contributions to psychoanalysis have been largely neglected, or we might even say, repressed. Dredging them up from the unconscious, this course seeks to rectify this neglect by providing an introduction to Freud’s original formulation of psychoanalysis as well as Spielrein’s and especially Salomé’s subsequent psychoanalytic interventions.

Weeks 1-2. Freud

We will begin by tracing Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as he followed his patients’ hysterical symptoms back to the conflict between their conscious ego and their libidinal desires. We then focus on his studies of perversion and sublimation, particularly creative and intellectual forms of sublimation. Both these phenomena consist in a means-ends reversal by which the foreplay or the warmup to the ego’s purportedly normal sexual aims of copulation and reproduction are fetishistically fixated upon for their own sake. It is Freud’s realization that certain perverse and sublimating drives are actually more fundamental than the ego’s self-preservative instincts that eventually leads him to propose his last great and most infamous concept of the death drive. There will be an emphasis on explicating all this in the maximally weirdest way possible through Freud’s writings on the uncanny, artistic visions, and the paranormal.

Suggested readings:

• Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume VII (1901-1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality, and Other Works, eds. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1981).
• Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XI (1910): Five Lectures on Psycho-analysis, Leonardo da Vinci, and Other Works, eds. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1981).

Week 3. Adler, Jung, Anna Freud, Klein, Lacan

Before looking at Salomé’s and Spielrein’s interventions head on, the third week seeks to distinguish them, as well as Freud, from five influential splinter schools of psychoanalysis. As we shall see, all five schools reduce the fundamental drives to intelligence and creativity that Freud uncovers as merely surface-level epiphenomena of allegedly more primal impulses. On the one hand, the Adlerian, Jungian, and ego psychology schools conflate the unconscious drives with the ego’s self-preservative instinct. On the other hand, the Kleinian and Lacanian schools interpret intellectual and creative sublimations as hollow fantasies covering over an infernal lack.

Suggested readings:

• Lou Salomé, The Erotic, trans. John Crisp (London: Transaction Publishers, 2012).

Weeks 4-5 Salomé and Spielrein

To get a better sense of Freud’s most trauma-inducing concept, so often the stuff of nightmares, the fourth and fifth weeks turn to Spielrein’s and especially Salomé’s original formulations of the death drive as our most fundamental desire to create even at the cost of our self-destruction. Through Salomé’s portraits of lovers, mothers, artists, and religious fanatics, as well as Spielrein’s portraits of schizophrenics among whom she includes Nietzsche, we will look at a whole host of agents who exemplify a dual creative-destructive drive making them all too willing to sacrifice their own well-being for the sake of giving birth to something greater than themselves.

Suggested readings:

• Lou Salomé, You Alone Are Real to Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Angela von der Lippe (New York: BOA Editions, 2003).
• Sabina Spielrein, “Destruction as the Cause of Becoming,” in The Essential Writings of Sabina Spielrein: Pioneer of Psychoanalysis, eds. and trans. Ruth I. Cape and Raymond Burt (London: Routledge, 2019).

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Introduction to a Philosophy of Opacity (or, Transparency and its Discontents)

Lecturer: Pat LeGates

“It could end up being obscure, which would perhaps not make me unhappy, if you were willing to be my accomplices in obscurity.”

—Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse

How do we approach the obscure? The Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant once remarked, “we clamor for the right to opacity for everyone,” invoking a concept which takes on many forms throughout his diverse body of work. But what did he mean by this? The reception of this claim has perhaps been equally enigmatic: some have interpreted it as an ethical imperative to protect alterity and cultural diversity, while others have taken it as a defense of writing in a cryptic philosophical style, as a proclamation of collective and universal struggle, or as a historical tether to Blackness which has its origins in the abyssal history of the transatlantic slave trade. We will see how each of these claims is grounded in Glissant’s thought as we come to our own conclusions, both reading for his concept of opacity and observing how it has appeared elsewhere. Starting off by defining opacity as an attempt to approach problems of the unknown, we will quickly drift off course in Glissant, realizing this is not really his concern. Given the prevailing tendency to represent thought itself in terms of clarity, to stage philosophy as a drama in which the transparent light of reason vanquishes opacity, we will also have to reckon somewhat dialectically with Glissant’s characterization of transparency. Approaching the question from the other side, how is transparency fundamentally reliant on opacity, in spite of their apparent antagonisms? Thus, this course is an invitation to grapple with both the potential affordances and the inevitable setbacks of thinking with opacity, asking what it might mean to ground speculation on its unstable terrain as we think about various topics including decoloniality, resistance, and approaching difficult texts. After Fredric Jameson, then, this course wagers to take obscurity as our object of study, to define “its specific quality and structure... and to compare [it] with other forms of verbal opacity,” rather than “resolving [its] immediate difficulties back into the transparency of rational thought.” Through its appearance across fields including Black studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and strains of political thought, we will consider opacity as potential incompleteness, negativity, evasiveness, illegibility, incoherence, and excess. This course will be taught assuming no familiarity with Glissant or his work, but his thought can be challenging—thus some familiarity with concepts/debates/authors in relevant fields will be helpful—however, I intend to make the course as accessible as possible. 

Lecture 1: Introduction: Glissant’s philosophy of opacity

This session introduces the topic of opacity at first generally and then more specifically in the work of Glissant. I introduce Glissant’s work in its historical and philosophical context before working through some of his key concepts and outlining the discussions to come in future sessions.

Readings: 

• Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, “For Opacity”
• Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, “Introduction” & “Introductions”

Lecture 2: Historicizing, politicizing, aestheticizing opacity 

This session relates opacity with the notion of the abyss and abyssal descent in Glissant as pertaining to the atlantic slave trade, which is central to Rizvana Bradley’s argument about the historicity, the ahistoricity, and perhaps the antehistory of Blackness. We will carefully work through this argument together. We’ll also contrast Hortense Spillers’s notion of the “Hieroglyphic of the Flesh” with the unsteady form of historicity Bradley describes. Then, putting Glissant, Bradley, and Denise Ferreira da Silva in conversation, we’ll look at their critique of Western Marxism via Žižek and Badiou. 

Readings: 

• Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, “The Open Boat”
• Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Fractal Thinking” & Rizvana Bradley, “Poethics of the Open Boat”
• Selections from Rizvana Bradley, Antaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form
• Denise Ferreira da Silva & Rizana Bradley, “Four Theses on Aesthetics” (optional)
• Selections from Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (optional)

Lecure 3: Opacity and psychoanalysis 

This session compares opacity with principles which abound in various iterations of psychoanalytic theory, ranging from the unknowability of the self to irreducibility, negativity, enigma, and the opacity of the signifier. We’ll discuss the affordances of opacity for making psychoanalytic arguments, along with points of tension between psychoanalysis and Glissant’s project at large.

Readings: 

• Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, “The Unconscious, Identity, and Method”
• Selections from Joan Copjec: Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, “Introduction: Structures Don’t March in the Streets,” & (Optional:) Chapter 2: “The Orthopsychic Subject:  Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan ”
• Selections from David Mariott, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being
• Selections from Avgi Saketopoulou: Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia
• Selections from Lauren Berlant & Lee Edelman, Sex, Or the Unbearable
• Selections from Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself

Lecture 4: Transparency vs. opacity, or the resistance of opacity

As surveillance and logistical capitalism abound logics of visibility, what happens to opacity? This session looks at how opacity has been theorized to offer resistance against hegemonic forms of transparency. We’ll consider how “zones of opacity” have been thought to represent both the materiality and rhythms of everyday life along with their disruption.

Readings: 

• Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, “Transparency and Opacity”
• Selections from Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century” Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times
• Selections from Ferdinand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400-1800
• Selections from Tiqqun, The Cybernetic Hypothesis
• Selections from Byung Chul-Han, The Transparency Society
• Selections from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete

Lecture 5: Conclusion: opacity in relation?

This session looks to recap some of the ideas from earlier in the course in context of Glissant’s broader argument in Poetics of Relation. We’ll look at opacity with respect to concepts of relation and éclat to discuss how aesthetics are at work in this text. Because the topics proposed for this course are broad yet dense, we can also use this session as a chance to answer lingering questions to complete prior discussions, or to look further into optional readings.

Readings: 

• Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, “That That”
• Fred Moten, “consent not to be a single being”

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Carl Schmitt on the Question of Sovereignty and the Political

Lecturer: Dimitri Vouros

Schmitt was one of the twentieth century’s most important yet most controversial political philosophers. His philosophy influenced many thinkers, including Walter Benjamin, Leo Strauss, Norberto Bobbio, Giorgio Agamben, Chantal Mouffe, and Andreas Kalyvas. This course aims to give an introductory overview of Schmitt’s political philosophy through a reading of two works, The Concept of the Political (1932) and Political Theology (1922). It will initially survey the intellectual context of Schmitt’s philosophy, from the causes of the crisis of liberalism in the 1920s to Schmitt’s problematic adoption of National Socialism. It will then introduce Schmitt’s understanding of the theological background to modern political concepts, his idea of sovereignty as the decision over the state of exception, and the neutralizing/depoliticizing effects of liberal modernity. This course will also present contemporary interpretations of Schmitt, especially those that understand the political as democratic contestation. Although centred around two texts, this course will incorporate other important writings by Schmitt and where relevant introduce the thought of philosophers who were influenced by him.

Lecture One: Methodological Questions and Historical Context

What is it to think the political?; Hume’s distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’; normative and realist approaches to the political; the intellectual context of modernity, the secularisation thesis and epistemological nihilism; Neo-Kantian legal and social theory in Max Weber and Hans Kelsen; understanding the fact-value distinction; overcoming positive and natural law; legal foundationalism and antifoundationalism; Schmitt’s problematic adoption of fascist ideology; the curious rise of ‘left Schmittianism’.

• Primary reading: Karl Löwith, ‘The Occasional Decisionism of Carl Schmitt’, in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism
• Secondary reading: Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy; Richard Wolin, ‘Carl Schmitt: The Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror’. 

Lecture Two: Reading The Concept of the Political (1)

The argument behind the political as the friend-enemy distinction; Hobbes’ ‘state of nature’ and political anthropology; the inflated status of natural right in the social contract tradition; risk and sacrifice in politics; nihilism and modernity’s encroaching ‘neutralizations and depoliticizations’; the centrality of decision in law and politics. 

• Primary reading: Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
• Secondary reading: Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, ‘The Concept of the Political’; Carl Schmitt, ‘The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations’.

Lecture Three: Reading The Concept of the Political (2)

The political meaning of secularism; surrogates for authority and tradition; the political as a sui generis branch of thinking; the shortcomings of pluralistic and normative approaches to the juridicopolitical; power dynamics and group alignments in state-based and international politics. 

• Primary reading: Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
• Secondary Reading: William Rasch, Carl Schmitt: State and Society

Lecture Four: Reading Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty

What is sovereignty, who is sovereign?; the miracle and political possibility; the extreme case and the exception; decisionism and commissary/plebiscitary dictatorship; popular sovereignty and the idea of constituent power; productive constituent power against state power; the critique of decisionism and the reality of emergency politics.

• Primary reading: Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty
• Secondary reading: Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary; Ellen Kennedy, ‘Norm and Exception: Carl Schmitt’s Concept of Sovereignty’ in Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar; Miguel Vatter, ‘The Political Theology of Carl Schmitt’ in The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt.

Lecture Five: Schmitt’s Influence on the Left

Radical democracy and the political; the state of exception; democratic contestation (agonism) and antagonism; critical theory on constitutionality and the question of recognition and justice; council democracy and the ‘politics of the extraordinary’; summary of the contribution of Schmitt’s philosophy to contemporary political theory.

• Primary reading: Matthew G. Specter, ‘What’s “Left” in Schmitt?” in The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt.
• Secondary reading: Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception; Ellen Kennedy, ‘Carl Schmitt and the Frankfurt School’; Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox; William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception; William E. Scheuerman, ‘States of Emergency’ in The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt.

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Minimal Communism: Love and Politics in Alain Badiou

Lecturer: A.J. Bartlett

‘…the true revolutionary is moved by strong feelings of love’

Che Guevara, Socialism and Man in Cuba

‘…conviction in love and politics, something one must never renounce.’

Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

Speaking in the terms of his articulation of the four conditions for philosophy, Alain Badiou remarked that love is effectively ‘minimal communism’, thus drawing a link or an articulation between two of his four ‘irreducible’ conditions: politics and love. Elsewhere, speaking to their relational distinction he has said that ‘politics begins where love ends’. 

Badiou’s work on politics and love  – both practical and theoretical – is extensive, and predates his articulation of them into distinct and operative ‘conditions’ for philosophy wherein these conditions are made formally compossible in terms of what in each is the same, that they effect or produce a truth. This double articulation as irreducible and formally the same – a constant from Being and Event through Logics of Worlds – has recently been somewhat rearticulated in the third big book of the Being and Event trilogy, Immanence of Truths, wherein Badiou explores (even if hinted elsewhere) a somewhat interconnected variation on their distinct conditionality, specifically in his late chapters on Comte, concerning politics and love. This rearticulation gives us an opportunity to re-interrogate the status of these two conditions in terms of their separability and more interestingly, in terms of their interaction and inter-activity. This course will interrogate/integrate Badiou’s two claims: love is minimal communism; politics begins where love ends. 

Taking heed of Guevara’s prescription quoted above, this course will interrogate Badiou’s oeuvre in four key ways, examining:

a) the formalisation of conditions 

b) the early, pre-conditions writing on love and politics

c) his separate and distinct conceptualisation of politics and love as irreducible singularity, which serves as the basis of their formal compossibility

d) looking from this formal compossibility to the possibility as suggested in Immanence of Truths (and by Guevara et. al) of some subjective rather than purely formal compossibility between politics and love. 

Lecture Outline: 

Week 1

General orientation

What is a condition

The generic.

Week 2 

Politics and Love: checking what condition my condition was in; the pre-Being and Event of them.

Week 3

Politics can be thought the idea of communism

Week 4

Love’s work is a thought of the two which is not one

Week 5

The compossible redux: Absolute style (Immanence of Truths)

For those not overly familiar with Badiou – man and philosopher – I recommend watching the film: Badiou @ https://vimeo.com/418047554

To become familiar with the basic framework read: Manifesto For Philosophy.

More complexly but still accessible, see the Interviews: ‘Being by Numbers’, Artforum, 1993 @ https://www.artforum.com/features/being-by-numbers-202925/ on Being and Event

&

‘Matters of Appearance, Artforum, 2006 @ https://www.artforum.com/features/matters-of-appearance-an-interview-with-alain-badiou-174543/ on Logics of Worlds

 In no specific order, we will consider texts, fragments and excerpts such as:

• Manifesto For Philosophy
• The Scene of the Two
• What is Love?
• In Praise of Love
• There’s No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship (with Barbara Cassin)
• Metapolitics
• Saint Paul
• On Beckett (Love)
• Lacan
• Can Politics be Thought
• Being and Event – e.g ‘formalisation’, Meditation 31
• Logics of Worlds – e.g. Kierkegaard, A Political Variant of the Physics of the Subject-of Truth; The Four Forms of Change – Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloise/Eloise and Abelard
• Immanence of Truths – e.g. Comte and Love/Finite Politics, Infinite Politics
• Theory of the Subject – e.g. Love What You Will Never Believe Twice
• The Century – Breton
• Badiou by Badiou