Winter School 2025

Eight courses taught over 5 weeks

The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy is proud to present the Winter 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..

Winter Programme

 

Course Descriptions

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Decolonial Feminism: From Anti-Colonial Feminism to Contemporary Tools for Liberation

Lecturers: Augustine Obi, Louisa Bufardeci

This course considers the significant contradiction of feminism: it relies on a colonial framing of gender. We offer an account of feminism from First Nation women, African women, Black women, Women of Colour and, to a lesser extent, white settler-colonial and European women. Our aim is twofold. First, to unpack the relationship between feminism, colonialism and gender by drawing from the insights of prominent Afro-feminist scholars like Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí and Sylvia Tamale, First Nation scholars such as Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Goenpul) and Lee Maracle, and other anti-colonial feminists like Silvia Federici and María Lugones. Second to show how feminism as a politics can respond to multiple, interconnected systems of oppression. We also look at the critical writing of bell hooks, Achille Mbembe, Audre Lorde, Akwugo Emejulu, María Lugones, Patricia Hill Collins, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and others. And we consider a range of strategies–feminist and otherwise–these, and other, writers offer, such as refusal, resistance, rest, play, joy, opacity, and relationality to push back against the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

LECTURE ONE - THE COLONIALITY OF GENDER: ADDRESSING THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

In the first session, we set the stage by unpacking the terms ‘Afro-feminism’, ‘Black feminism’, ‘Indigenous feminism’, ‘Women of Colour feminism’ and ‘decolonial feminism’ to see why these feminist experiences and sensibilities reject white western feminism’s tendency toward a “one-size-fits-all” approach. In this way we highlight the diversity of women’s experiences across cultures and histories. The explication of these terms serve as a segue into a close consideration of the arguments in Oyĕwùmí’s The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, and Tamale’s Decolonisation and Afro-Feminism, highlighting their conceptual frameworks and implicit points of reference. This analysis is supplemented by an explication of T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Negritude Women and Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms, and Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason to see how these scholars provided the important philosophical and literary critiques that challenged and reshaped understanding of Black identity, thought and feminism. Having moved through these texts, we see how colonialism’s gendered impact, which included the imposition of rigid European gender norms and patriarchal systems, disrupted and often erased pre-colonial gender systems that were more fluid and balanced.  

RECOMMENDED READINGS

• Fanon, F. (1965). Preface and Algeria Unveiled. In A Dying Colonialism (pp. 23-68). New York: Grove Press.
• Lugones, M. (2016). The Coloniality of Gender. In W. Harcourt (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development : Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice (pp. 13-33). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Oyěwùmí, O. (1997). Preface and Introduction. In The Invention of Women : Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (pp. ix-30). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Tamale, S. (2020). Some Key Definitions and Introduction. In Decolonization and Afro-feminism (pp. xiii-16). Ottawa: Daraja Press.
• Tuck, E., & Yang, W. K. (2012). Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1-40. doi:10.25058/20112742.n38.04.

LECTURE TWO - ON BALANCE: FIRST NATIONS and COLONIAL FEMINISM

This lecture returns to the idea of balance in pre-colonial social systems. Here we start with the work of Kombumerri philosopher Mary Graham who teaches us about the important role balance played, and continues to play, in sustaining healthy and fair social relations in many First Nations communities. We also take a brief look at what we can know about pre-colonial social relations in Turtle Island (North America) from Cherokee scholar Virginia Carney. Turning our minds back to more contemporary times we consider the critique of white feminism by Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson in her book Talkin’ Up to the White Woman and her article ‘Towards and Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory’. We also reflect on the work of Lee Maracle, an Indigenous Canadian writer and academic of the Stó꞉lō nation and a text by the  Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Ultimately we acknowledge that the experience of First Nation women is incommensurable to that of white, settler-colonial women, so we wrap up this session with a discussion about this incommensurability.

RECOMMENDED READING

• Bufardeci, L. (2024). “What to Do?”. In Tacking and a Tacktical Methodology: Moving Towards a Different Politics for Art (pp. 22-56). Leiden: Brill.
• Carney, V. (2001). Nanye'hi and Kitteuha: War Women of the Cherokee. In B. A. Mann (Ed.), Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands (pp. 123-143). Westport: Greenwood Press.
• Graham, M. (1999). Some Thoughts About the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews. Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture and Ecology, 3(2), 105-118. doi:10.1163/156853599X00090
• Maracle, L. (1996). The Women’s Movement. In I Am Woman: A Native’s Perspective on Sociology and Feminism. Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers.
• Moreton-Robinson, A. (2020). Introduction. In Talkin' up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (pp. xxi-xxxi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
• Simpson, L. B. (2017). Kwe as Resurgent Method. In As We Have Always Done (pp. 27-38): University of Minnesota Press.

LECTURE THREE - AFRO-FEMINISM AND INTERSECTIONALITY

In this session we discuss the concept of ‘Intersectionality’, and its connection with Afro-feminism in Africa, Brazil and America. We consider how an intersectional approach to feminism critiques a single-axis framework, as well as recognises that the solutions to any racial and gendered oppression must address the multiple layers of oppression simultaneously, as opposed to isolating race or gender as distinct categories. By connecting Afro-feminism to intersectionality, this lecture helps us to understand how the two frameworks create a more complex and holistic approach to gender justice that recognises and addresses the complexities of women’s experiences. We also discuss a range of Black feminists’ theorising from the United States. Through analysing the work of theorists like bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Patricia Hill Collins, we see how the survival of Black women’s theorising in the face of epistemic and ontological inflictions imposed by systems of oppression comes from a range of practices. These include resisting and disrupting the varied oppressions that have marginalised their narratives and voices and through shaping stories of their ways of knowing and being that are grounded in their experiences, histories and aspirations. Our aim is to examine the nuance and depth of Black feminist theories to discern how they have created alternative pathways toward liberation and self-determination.

RECOMMENDED READINGS

• African Feminist Forum. (2016). Charter of Feminist Principle for African Feminists. Retrieved from https://www.africanfeministforum.com/feminist-charter-introduction
• Collins, P. H. (1989). The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14(4), 745-773. doi:10.1086/494543
• Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2020). What is Intersectionality? In Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Combahee River Collective. (1983). A Black Feminist Statement. In C. Moraga & G. Anzaldua (Eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (pp. 210-218). Albany: SUNY Press.
• Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241-1299.
• hooks, b. (1991). Theory as Liberatory Practice. Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 4, 1-12. 
• Lorde, A. (1984). Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg: Crossing Press.
• Othieno, C. A., & Davis, A., on behalf of Mwasi Collectif. (2019). Those Who Fight for Us without Us Are against Us: Afrofeminist Activism in France. In A. Emejulu & F. Sobande (Eds.), To Exist Is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (pp. 46-62). London: Pluto Press.

LECTURE FOUR - BREAKING FREE AND THINKING NEW: TOWARDS A DECOLONIAL FEMINISM

Having considered what is integral to the global Black feminists’ framework, in this session we look at different ways to imagine a world where both gender and colonial domination can be totally dismantled. In other words, given how global Black feminism is still mired in coloniality and collusion, this lecture zeros in on Audre Lorde’s argument that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Here we consider the complexity of the concept of ‘decolonisation’ and look at the way that concept has spurred creative and substantial responses to the problem of colonial patriarchy.

RECOMMENDED READINGS

• Alcoff, L. M. (2019). Decolonizing Feminist Theory: Latina Contributions to the Debate. In A. J. Pitts, M. Ortega, & J. Medina (Eds.), Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance(pp. 11-28). New York: Oxford Academic.
• Lorde, A. (2018 [1979]). The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House. In. London: Penguin Books.
• Lugones, M. 2010. Towards a Decolonial Feminism. Hypatia vol. 25, no. 4(742-759).
• Tuck, E., & Yang, W. K. (2012). Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1-40. doi:10.25058/20112742.n38.04
• Vergès, F., & Bohrer, A. J. (2021). ‘Preface’, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, ‘1. Taking Sides: Decolonial Feminism’ (A. J. Bohrer, Trans.). In A Decolonial Feminism. London: Pluto Press.

LECTURE FIVE - THE TOOLS FOR TOTAL LIBERATION

In this session we discuss the tools for liberation offered to everyone by Afro-feminists, Indigenous feminists and Black feminists and others. These tools are sometimes similar to those of white, western feminism, but more often they are very different. They include consciousness raising (Anzaldúa), play (Lugones), joy and pleasure (Lorde), opacity (Glissant), rest (Hersey), refusal (Campt), futurity (Karera), queerness (Hammonds), abolition (Davis), care (Hayes & Kaba), listening (Gumbs) and relationality (Graham and Dudgeon & Bray). Taken into the world, these tools prove it is necessary to build with a multiplicity of tools and in a multiplicity of ways in order to truly find a way beyond what bell hooks calls the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

RECOMMENDED READINGS

• Anzaldúa, G. (2013). Now Let Us Shift . . . The Path of Conocimiento . . . Inner Work, Public Acts. In G. Anzaldúa & A. Keating (Eds.), This Bridge We Call Home : Radical Visions for Transformation. London: Taylor & Francis Group.
• Campt, T. M. (2019). Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal. Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory, 29(1), 79-87.  
• Davis, A. Y., Dent, G., Meiners, E., R., & Richie, B., E. (2022). Introduction. In Abolition. Feminism. Now.Chicago: Haymarket Books.
• Dudgeon, P., & Bray, A. (2019). Indigenous Relationality: Women, Kinship and the Law. Genealogy, 3 (23), 1-11. doi:10.3390/genealogy3020023
• Glissant, E. (1997). For Opacity (B. Wing, Trans.). In Poetics of Relation (pp. 189-194). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Graham, M. (2014). Aboriginal Notions of Relationality and Positionalism: A Reply to Weber. Global Discourse, 4(1), 17-22. doi:10.1080/23269995.2014.895931
• Gumbs, A. P. (2020). One: Listen. In Undrowned : Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Edinburgh: AK Press.
• Hammonds, E. (1994). Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality. differences, 6 (2-3), 126-145. doi:10.1215/10407391-6-2-3-126
• Hayes, K., & Kaba, M. (2023). Care Is Fundamental. In Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
• Hersey, T. (2022). Preface. In Rest Is Resistance : A Manifesto (pp. 8-11). New York: Little, Brown Spark.
• Karera, A. (2019). Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics. Critical Philosophy of Race, 7 (1), 32-56. doi:10.5325/critphilrace.7.1.0032
• Lorde, A. (1984). Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg: Crossing Press.
• Lugones, M. (1987). Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception. Hypatia, 2(2), 3-19. 
• Morgan, J. (2015). Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure. The Black Scholar, 45(4), 36-46.

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Let the Struggle Begin! Nietzsche on Competition

Lecturer: Vincent Lê

This course looks at Nietzsche’s writings on the Greek agon, experimental science, natural selection, and other competitive selection processes, which he conceives as a kind of epistemology enabling agents to maximize their power. According to this competitive epistemology, agents may calculate whether a real improvement in their intelligence, creativity and resourcefulness has been achieved through trial-and-error selection processes by means of which they demonstrably prove themselves to excel more than other rival agents.

Week 1. Perspectivism

The first week addresses a popular scholarly interpretation of Nietzsche’s writings on language as leading to his doctrine of “perspectivism” whereby all truths are relative to different communities’ collective rules, social standards, and linguistic uses for what counts as true. We shall see that this line of interpretation ultimately struggles to fully account for how Nietzsche can also make frequent value judgments about some agents being better than others through his many rank orderings between higher and lower types, ascending and descending forms of life, master and slave moralities, and so on.

Suggested readings:

• Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, eds. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 139-153.
• Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (London: Harvard University Press, 1985), 1-4.
• Arthur C. Danto, “Perspectivism,” in Nietzsche as Philosopher: Expanded Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 54-81.

Weeks 2-4: Competition 

Particularly drawing inspiration from his neglected 1873 essay “Homer’s Contest,” the vast bulk of the course explores the hypothesis that Nietzsche may only reject the idea that language using agents can arrive at objective truths through rational discussion in favor of establishing a legitimate order of rank by getting agents to compete, with those emerging victorious demonstrably proving in practice to be the most intelligent, creative and resourceful. In the second to fourth weeks, we will reconstruct this agonistic method for determining genuine enhancements of power by looking at three main contrasts in Nietzsche’s early, middle, and late period works.

Week 2. Competition in the Early Period Works: The Greek Agon contra Rationalism

Suggested readings:

• Friedrich Nietzsche. “Homer’s Contest,” in Nietzscheana 5, edited and translated by Christa Davis Acampora. Urbana: North American Nietzsche Society, 1996, 1-8.
• Yunus Tuncel. “The Mythic Context of the Agon,” in Agon in Nietzsche. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2013, 19-41.

Week 3. Competition in the Middle Period Works: Modern Experimental Science contra Social Democracy

Suggested readings:

• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche 3: Human, All Too Human, I: A Book for Free Spirits, eds. Alan D. Schrift, Duncan Large, and Adrian Del Caro, trans. Gary Handwerk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), sections 7 (preface), 164, 224, 235, 237, 242, 634-5.

Week 4. Competition in the Late Period Works: Natural Selection contra Christianity

Suggested readings:

• Neil Durrant, “A Naturalist Alternative,” in Nietzsche’s Renewal of Ancient Ethics: Friendship as Contest (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 53-71.
• Friedrich Nietzsche, “‘Good and Evil,’ ‘Good and Bad,’” in On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche 8: Beyond Good and Evil / On the Genealogy of Morals, eds. Alan D. Schrift, Duncan Large, and Adrian Del Caro, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 217-245.

Week 5: Intelligence

The final week responds to a possible objection to competitive epistemology: Nietzsche sometimes says that the weak types have paradoxically prevailed over the strong types. We will see how he qualifies that the weak types can only do so either by teaming up to become collectively stronger than any one individual strong type or by individual weak types cultivating enough power to overthrow the once strong types who grow idle and complacent due to their monopoly rule. We will then conclude by looking at certain parallels between Nietzsche’s understanding of intelligence and creativity as multi-agent collective systems and contemporary cognitive science theories of extended mind.

Suggested readings:

• Andy Clark and David Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998): 7-19.
• Christa Davis Acampora. “Nietzsche and Embodied Cognition,” in Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind, edited by Manuel Dries (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2018), 17-47.

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Fortunes of Philosophy: Heidegger on Art, Science, Technology, and Humanism

Lecturer: Ingo Farin

Martin Heidegger is easily the most controversial and, arguably, one of the most important and misunderstood philosophers in the 20th century. In this course we will read and discuss select key essays by Heidegger (written after Being and Time) to gain a good understanding of Heidegger’s middle and later philosophy, and we will look how his philosophy can illuminate our situation in the 21st century, and how it relates to the history of philosophy. The idea is to discuss and critique Heidegger’s ideas without falling into Heidegger jargon (or any other jargon, for that matter)x. There are no prerequisites for this course, although some familiarity with Heidegger’s Being and Time would be helpful. 

Key essays for our course are contained in David Krell’s book Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger. They are: “The Origin of the Work of Art”; “Letter on ‘Humanism’”; “The Question concerning Technology”; “What Calls for Thinking?”; “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” Two other texts, “The Age of the World Picture” and “Science and Reflection” are printed in William Lovitt, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Both books are available in libraries. In addition, we will look at Heidegger’s hitherto untranslated essay “Rimbaud Vivant” and “On the Sixtina” (of which I will provide electronic copies). I will also draw on other materials, including secondary literature, in my lectures.  

For each session I will provide a summary of the main ideas and then open it up for debate among the participants of the course. There is also room to discuss specific topics suggested by participants.    

Course Schedule

Week One: Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art. Primary texts “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “Rimbaud Vivant,” and “On the Sixtina.”     

Week Two: Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science. Primary Texts: “The Age of the World Picture,” “Science and Reflection.”   

Week Three: Heidegger’s Philosophy of Technology in an age of AI. Primary Text: “The Question Concerning Technology.”

Week Four: Heidegger and Humanism in our Age. Primary Text: “Letter on Humanism” 

Week Five: The Fortunes of Philosophy in Modernity: “What calls for Thinking” and “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” 

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Crossing (Out) the Limit(s) in the Continental Tradition

Lecturer: Terrence Thomson

In this lecture series, we will explore the concept of limit(s) in the continental tradition. The aim of the course is to see that the question of the limit serves to inform a delimitation of the continental tradition as the practice which consists of a radical challenge to the limit(s) of philosophy itself. We’ll see how the continental tradition (as it is represented in the three figures Kant-Heidegger-Derrida) constellates, all at once, a demand to stay within the limit(s), a pushing up against the limit(s), and a—always-already—transgression of the limit(s).

We’ll push off from Kant’s layered and complicated discussion of the difference between “Grenzen” (boundaries) and “Schranken” (limits) in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. The border drawn between a boundary and a limit invites us to ask a question that will echo in the continental tradition in a variety of registers: is the border between a boundary and a limit itself a boundary or a limit? We’ll explore how, for Kant, the boundary is a line that we are on (auf der Grenze), that critical reason is “bounded” by straddling the two sides of Transcendental Logic (truth and error), while the limit is a negation indicative of (negative) noumena, a purely intelligible thought-world which we cannot venture into while simultaneously retaining our claim to knowledge. This in turn invites us to explore the thin line (boundary or limit?) between the phenomenal and the noumenal as it plays out in a deleted (crossed-out) note from Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View where an “unfathomable abyss” is said to lie at the core of the human being. We will ask what this abyss means and whether it relates to the sublime, understood as a moment in which the limit is somewhat impossibly transgressed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.

This prompts us to investigate how these constellations are explicitly and implicitly received in the continental tradition, specifically in Heidegger and Derrida. We’ll see the limit cast in the role of Sein-zum-Tode, Being-to(wards)-death, in Heidegger’s Being and Time, where death is not just a horizonal, noumenal limit “over-there” (as it was for Kant) but the finite manner in which our being-here (Dasein) is oriented towards/within the world. In many ways, and this will serve as the thread of the third lecture, Heidegger picks up on and unpacks the abyss at the center of the human being in Kant’s deleted note, casting it as the real limit, a limit that we push up against and embody.

In the fourth lecture we shall pick up on Derrida’s reception of this and see how it plays out in his discourse on the aporia—which mainly focuses on Heidegger and death. The lecture will seek to unpack Derrida’s understanding of the aporia as “the impossible, the impossibility, as what cannot pass [passer] or come to pass [se passer]” (Derrida, Aporias,p.23) and the manner in which it terminates, or represents a terminal point of, the limit. The last part of this course will focus on Derrida’s metaphoric of the eardrum in his “Tympan” from Margins of Philosophy to explore its discussion of the thin skin limiting an “inside” from an “outside” and how there are transgressions of this limit. This in turn will inform some thoughts on how the marginal, marginalia, deletions, call into question the text itself: where should the limit be with respect to what we include or exclude in a corpus or a text? Is there a “beyond” where the corpus or text is concerned and if so does this tell us anything about our primary question (is the border between the limit and the boundary itself a limit or a boundary)? By reiterating this question we’ll see how the limit, for Derrida, is always-already transgressed from inside-out, so to speak, that the limit presupposes a constant margin that cannot be fully captured within that which is delimited and that this helps us to sketch out a broader relationship between philosophy and the continental tradition.

Week 1

In this first week, I’ll set out a few broad thoughts on limits in contemporary culture, focusing specifically on the meaning of the liminal in music and literature. I’ll briefly explore two examples: the electronic music duo Autechre and Mark Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves. I’ll suggest that the limit, understood in this sense, is the laying down of a challenge. 

After this brief introduction we’ll explore Kant’s attempted distinction between Grenzen and Schranken, boundaries and limits. We’ll see how the border between them is not so stable, calling into question the very meaning of each term. We will then explore in depth how the boundary refers to reason as it splits off into a Transcendental Analytic (truth; land) and a Transcendental Dialectic (error; stormy ocean). On the other hand, we’ll try to unpack the phrase: limit denotes the noumenal and the noumenal denotes limit(s) of the phenomenal.

Main Reading:

• Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, §§57-60

Supplementary Reading:

• Bennington, Kant on the Frontier, Appendix, pp.205-223
• Alenka Zupančič, “The Kantian Limits”

Week 2

We continue with Kant this week but from two distinct (and yet entirely interconnected, or so I will argue) angles—and so in two distinct hours. On the one hand, during the first hour, we shall explore a little read deleted footnote (this will allow us to discuss the “crossing (out)” element of the title of this course) in a section of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View in which he encounters an apparent “unfathomable depth” or “abyss” at the core of the human being. We’ll explore how this points to the limit of critical philosophy. Moreover, we shall explore the meaning of Kant having deleted this footnote and that our reading it is, in some ways, beyond the limit Kant intended, the limit here understood as the lines crossing out the footnote.

On the other hand, during the second hour, we will concern ourselves with the sublime in the third Critique. With this section we shall explore what it looks like in the critical philosophy when a limit is crossed and yet somehow remaining present as limit.

We shall explore whether or not these two angles, these two hours, connect together or whether they represent two entirely distinct encounters with/descriptions of the limit (or perhaps they are bounds?).

Main Reading:

• Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, §6-§7 (pp.26-34)
• Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §23-§29 (pp.128-158)

Supplementary Reading:

• Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, pp.87-103
• Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, pp.42-44

Week 3

This week we dip our toes into Being and Time, and specifically the sections dealing with Sein-zum-Tode or Being-towards-death in which Heidegger lays out the essential component of Dasein’s differentiation from other beings. We’ll explore the meaning of finitude (Endlichkeit) in this context and the significance of the “individualization” of death. Moreover, we will investigate death in Heidegger as an unsurpassable limit or horizon looming upon us at all times as a horizonal, existential-ontological limit. That is, how the limit (=death) is put to use by Heidegger as the fundamental element of what it means to be a human being. Moreover, this will lead us to a brief discussion of transcendence in Heidegger as the crossing of the limit constitutive of Dasein’s temporality (ek-stasis). That is, we shall plot out a view in which Dasein’s reaching out beyond itself (for the sake of being what it is) implies a transgression of the limit but not understood as a move towards the absolute, the infinite or the “beyond”, but rather a move towards the world (the thing) itself.

Main Reading:

• Heidegger, Being and Time, Division II: §§46-53, pp. 274-312
• Heidegger, Being and Time, Division II: §65, pp.370-380

Supplementary Reading:

• Francoise Dastur, “Phenomenology of Mortal Being” in Death: An Essay on Finitude, pp.39-60

Week 4

This week we turn to Derrida and rather fittingly his lecture “Finis” in which he delicately carves out a series of channels between endings and limits, death and transgression. Perhaps an elaborate commentary on Heidegger’s Sein-zum-Tod we might even ask after the limit between Derrida and Heidegger in this connection. What is the limit between Derrida discussing the “syntagm” my death and Heidegger’s delineation of the verenden of beings and thesterben of Dasein? Do we, alongside Derrida, encounter a certain aporia here? And aporia becomes a centerpiece of Derrida’s discussion, where it represents a sort of edge of the limit, a point at which there is a total abyss. In this connection, we’ll explore Derrida’s “three types of border limits”: geographic-territorial; discursive disciplinary fields; conceptual-terminological. We shall ask where these border limits stand with respect to the “my death” Derrida receives from Heidegger and what type of border limit we might trace out between Heidegger’s “my death” and Derrida’s “my death” (if any).

Main Reading:

• Derrida, Aporias, “Finis”, pp. 1-42

Supplementary Reading:

• David Wood, Philosophy at the Limit, pp.37-40; pp.132-149

Week 5

In this last week we stick with Derrida and this time his short piece “Tympan”, which we shall discuss in terms of Derrida’s own multi-layered metaphorics: the eardrum as a thin border delimiting a very fuzzy difference between “inside” and “outside”. We’ll see how this metaphor helps to guide a discourse on the limit in two senses: a discourse about the limit and a discourse which is situated on the limit. This opens up the other metaphorical device used here: the printing of/in the margins, which serves to question us in the practice of philosophical reading. And this ports us into the fundamental question at stake here, namely, how do we read this (or for that matter any) text? Moreover, and here we can refer back to our original question at the start of the course, is the border between what is “inside” this text and “outside” it, itself a limit or a boundary, and how should we distinguish these in this context?

I’ll then conclude the course with some broader thoughts on the relationship between philosophy and continental philosophy and how the limit is vital for reading this difference.

Main Reading:

• Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, “Tympan”, pp. ix-xxix

Supplementary Reading:

• Saitya Brata Das, What is Thinking?, “Derrida’s Tympan: Mourning, Philosophy, Literature”, pp.71-88

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Politics as War: Mapping Modern Political Concepts Through the Paradigm of War. Foucault and Agamben.

Lecturer: Carlo Crosato

Is it possible to speak of political conflict in the modern age? Modern political science can be described as a theoretical operation aimed at excluding conflict by abstracting individuals from their relational fabric and constructing the fiction of a sovereign to obey—since only the sovereign can guarantee peace. Michel Foucault denounced this, attempting to revitalize political conflict after the great modern depoliticization. Decades later, Giorgio Agamben engaged with the theme of civil war, describing it as the great hidden secret upon which modern politics is founded as a guarantor of peace. This series of lectures aims to analyse the different ways in which Foucault and Agamben have used the theme of war to expose modern political theory in its most concealed aspects.

In 1976, Foucault initiated an experiment to rethink politics beyond modern theory. His hope was to revive political conflict by requalifying subjects in a historical and political sense, beyond the modern annihilation of their agency. However, his experiment resulted in failure, as modern subjects tend to replicate the typically modern theological-political dialectic, continuously constituting and reconstituting new sovereigns under whose rule politics remains annihilated.

At that point, Foucault did not go much further than what Carl Schmitt had already acknowledged, while still retaining modern political concepts—namely, the close kinship between politics and war. In a recently added section to one of his 2015 works, which has never been translated into other languages, Giorgio Agamben hypothesizes that Schmitt’s recognition conceals what modern political theory truly fears: not the introduction of war into politics, but the reduction of politics to play. While the antagonistic aspect of modern political theology is acknowledged, what remains hidden is the truly conflictual nature of politics—its agonistic dimension—which modern political theory has annihilated.

Rediscovering the agonistic nature of politics means rediscovering its inherently conflictual nature, in which society is driven by concrete and historical forces engaged in an unending confrontation. This is precisely what Foucault rediscovers in the 1980s by turning to ancient politics, with particular interest in the life of the Cynics.

1. Polemicizing Reality

Michel Foucault’s entire philosophical work is dedicated to questioning the concepts we use in our thinking and actions. These concepts appear universal, ahistorical, and justified by their supposed naturalness. However, they possess a history of their own: they are formulated and upheld by complex theoretical or political strategies aimed at concealing their contingency and partiality, imposing them as universal. Genealogy is a method Foucault developed in the 1970s while engaging with Nietzsche’s work. Through the genealogical perspective, it becomes possible to uncover the tumultuous history behind concepts and the power structures they justify. 

In a 1974 lecture, Foucault reconstructs how the modern conceptual constellation asserts itself by projecting its partiality onto a universal scale, thereby obscuring its contingency and effectively preventing any possible contestation. In a seminal 1977 article, Foucault systematizes the genealogical method as a tool for revealing the conflicts from which all historical positivity emerges.

Key Texts: 

• Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power (1974), New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 235-247.
• Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1977), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by D. F. Bouchard, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1980, 139-164.

2. Polemology and Self-Dialectization

During the 1976 academic course, Foucault attempts to break through the curtain of modern Hobbesian political theory. He criticizes the depoliticization of human life, achieved by reducing politics to a cycle in which a pure, individual subject—naturally free and equal to all others, abstracted from any relationship—ultimately becomes a subject subjugated to power, relating only to the sovereign authority. There seems to be no room for concrete relationships and conflict in modern political theory.

Foucault questions the nature of conflict in Hobbes. He questions whether there is actually war in Hobbes, since what we find in the pages of the founder of modern political science is merely mutual suspicion, threats, and fear. These are the elements that the theorist of sovereignty employs to describe the establishment of sovereign power as the plea for protection by subjects terrified by fear. Thus, Foucault takes on the task of reactivating the true conflict—not mere mutual fear, nor even the war of all against all, but rather the partisan struggles laden with history and politics.

Even sovereign power itself was once one of these historical-political factions, yet it imposed itself by casting a shadow over political conflict, reducing it to mere fear in the absence of sovereign authority. The lesson aims to show how Foucault’s polemological experiment ultimately fails: the philosopher sought to revive a politics annihilated by modern theory, yet he soon realized that reactivating historical-political factions only led them to reproduce the same dialectic of sovereignty. The problem lies precisely in the geometry of modern power, which frames conflict as an accident to be avoided—an antagonism to sovereign authority that, in the end, merely serves to establish a new sovereign power.

Key Text: 

• Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (1976), New York, Picador, 2003, 1-64, 215-237.

3. War as a Challenge for Western Political Ontology

For Foucault, war can be a useful framework for understanding the true nature of historical relations. Agamben’s political ontology does not aim to reignite the historical and political forces that modern political theory has annihilated, but rather to trace the ontological form of all Western thought. Agamben sees in civil war—a war that threatens an established civil order—the opportunity to challenge the distinctions made by Western politics throughout history. If Western culture operates through the exception, which combines metaphysics and nihilism, civil war inverts the movement of the exception and brings to light the original “indistinguishabilities” through which this movement passes. With Agamben, the focus is not so much on historicity, but on the transcendental origin, a condition coextensive with any historicity, and for this reason, civil war is understood not because it is a tumultuous historical element, but because of its ability to illuminate the urgency of Western political ontology to draw zones of indistinction on which sovereign decisions can make their distinctions.

For Agamben, civil war is the reagent that brings to light the intrinsic politicization of what Western thought throughout history has defined as apolitical, in order to impose its sovereign decisions upon it. By reading the historiographical work of Loraux and the Hobbesian classics, Agamben analyses the different historical ways in which civil war can challenge the established order and, for this reason, has been constantly excluded from the political realm. In the premodern world, civil war would demonstrate how the apolitical is always active within the political, while in the modern world, civil war is that from which the political is constituted through its exclusion, but precisely for this reason, it is also what gives the political its meaning.

Key Text:

• Giorgio Agamben, Stasis. Civil War as a Political Paradigm, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2015.

4. Politics Between Seriousness and Play

In an additional chapter of Stasis, published in 2018 and never translated into other languages, Agamben notes how contemporary thought, with Schmitt, has finally accepted the need to come to terms with the polemological dimension of politics, with what modern political thought has always sought to conceal. Yet something still remains hidden; something that political thought still refuses to confess. It is a crucial element, which not only does Agamben not fully develop in a historical analysis of Western politics, but also explains the failure of the Foucauldian experiment and the shift towards ancient ethics.

In some curious passages of his work, Schmitt asserts the seriousness of the political by describing it as the confrontation with the enemy. This grants the utmost seriousness to the political. In so doing, Schmitt excludes the possibility of politics being seen as a game, as Huizinga proposed in his genealogy of play in antiquity. This lesson is dedicated to read and interpret the new section of Giorgio Agamben’s book. 

I will discuss how modern politics arises from the depoliticization of relations, from the annihilation of concrete and conflicting relationships, and from the promise of Pax et Justitia. Contemporary politics admits this latent and constant presence of war in modern politics, but only in the form of antagonism, that is, the clash with the established power that represents the people, in other words, the intrusion of the enemy. What contemporary politics continues to deny is the agonism intrinsic to the concrete relations between humans, on whose depoliticization the modern sovereign order is based.

Key Text:

• Giorgio Agamben, Nota sulla guerra, il gioco e il nemico, in Id., Stasis. La guerra civile come paradigma politico. Homo sacer. Ediz. Ampliata, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri 2019 (the lecturer will provide PDF).

Recommended reading:

• Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Interruption of Time into Play, Corvallis, Plutarch Press, 2006.

5. Ancient Agonism as a Revival of Political Conflict

I will assume the modern conceptual constellation as a theoretical aggregate. It consists of the constitution of a power whose actual historical genealogy is rendered inaccessible precisely by theory: the latter describes the formation of sovereign power as the plea of a multitude of frightened individuals. They authorize the sovereign to order their lives through his will, which becomes law. Obedience is owed to the sovereign based on authorization—formally and regardless of the content of the sovereign’s decisions. For this reason, all conflict is excluded. The only form of instability is that which overthrows power and establishes a new one. Schmitt places at the core of his work precisely this struggle against the enemy as the true and only essence of politics, leaving in the shadows the more vivid and concrete agonism that could animate society beyond the formal structure of sovereign power.

The failure of the polemological experiment of 1976 is due to the fact that the antagonistic form through which Foucault sought to revive modern political nihilism is itself part of political modernity. Self-dialectization is precisely the dialectic that Hobbes excludes from his idea of politics and that Schmitt admits to be the only form of politics still possible after modernity. If Schmitt places war at the centre of his definition of the political, it is because he knows that modernity must take care to conceal something even more dangerous: play, in the etymological sense of agon.

Foucault’s research in the 1980s can be understood as an effort to engage with a politics revitalized not through modern antagonism, but through the recovery of premodern agonism. The protagonists are no longer the abstract figures of modernity, that is, transcendental subjects, but rather the concrete relations that segment collective life and imbue both individual and collective identities with meaning. This is not, however, an irenic vision of political life; rather, it is a recovery of true conflictuality after the annihilation of relationships brought about by modern mechanistic thought and its corresponding idea of politics and law.

As an emblem of this agonistic conflictuality, Foucault’s reconstruction of the Cynic practice will be examined. Foucault’s intent proves to be that of escaping an idea of truth as a sovereign (and scientific) horizon. It is, even at the cost of one’s life, about bringing to light the concrete truth of the relational entanglements and powers in which we are immersed, and stretching their threads to the point of even tearing them apart.

Key Text:

• Michel Foucault, The Courage of the Truth (1984), New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 117-176.

Recommended reading:

• Daniele Lorenzini, The Force of Truth, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago, 2023, 15-54.

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The Political Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben

Lecturer: Paul Gorby

Since the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995, Giorgio Agamben has been a leading figure in Continental political philosophy, engaging simultaneously with niche philosophical debates and real-world political events. This course will provide an introduction to Giorgio Agamben’s political thought by situating Agamben’s political philosophy within its political context across his writings. Covering key works in the Homo Sacer series, as well as Agamben’s interventions into contemporary issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this course will address the concepts most central to understanding his thought, including biopolitics, sovereign power, the state of exception, and destituent potential. Each session will be divided into two parts: a one-hour lecture on the content and concepts for that week and a one-hour discussion session which considers how these concepts manifest themselves in our contemporary political crises.

Lecture One: Biopolitics and Sovereign Power

This lecture will, firstly, provide some brief biographical and intellectual background on Agamben, detailing his background and primary philosophical influences. This will lead into a discussion of the two concepts which lie at the heart of his first major political work: biopolitics and sovereign power, concepts drawn and adapted from the writings of Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt.

Core readings:

Agamben, Giorgio (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen) (Stanford: Stanford University Press)

- Introduction: pp. 1-12

- §1.1. The Paradox of Sovereignty: pp. 15-29

- §3.1 – §3.3. The Politicization of Life; Biopolitics and the Rights of Man; Life

That Does Not Deserve to Live: pp. 119-143 

Supplementary reading:

Whyte, Jessica (2013), Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben (New York: SUNY Press)

- Chapter 1: The Politics of Life: pp. 19-46

Lecture Two: State of Exception

The second session will consider the concept of the State of Exception, linking it – as Agamben scholar Adam Kotsko recommends – to Agamben’s writings on civil war and stasis. In this way, we can read Agamben’s second and third books of the Homo Sacer series in conjunction, and recognise them as steps towards his development of a theory of government and oikonomia.

Core readings:

Agamben, Giorgio (2005), State of Exception (trans. Kevin Attell) (Chicago: Chicago University Press)

- Chapters 1-4: pp. 1-64

Agamben, Giorgio (2015), Stasis: Civil War as Political Paradigm (trans. Nicholas Heron) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press)

- Chapter 1: pp. 1-19 

Supplementary reading:

Kotsko, Adam (2020), Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press)

- Chapter 3, section 3: pp. 112-118

Lecture Three: Government and Oikonomia

The third lecture will turn to Agamben’s writings on political and economic theology, particularly the themes of government, oikonomia, and capitalism. Following Agamben, we will discuss the theological foundations of contemporary capitalistic forms of economic governance and consider some of the ways in which contemporary capitalism operates as a religion.

Core readings:

Agamben, Giorgio (2008), The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (trans. Lorenzo Chiesa, with Matteo Mandarini) (Stanford: Stanford University Press)

- §2 The Mystery of the Economy: pp. 17-52

Agamben, Giorgio (2019), Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism (trans. Adam Kotsko) (Stanford: Stanford University Press)

- Chapter 5: Capitalism as Religion: pp. 66-77 

Supplementary reading:

Dean, Mitchell (2012), ‘Governmentality Meets Theology: The King Reigns but He Does Not Govern’, Theory, Culture & Society Vol. 29, No. 3: pp. 145-158

Lecture Four: Form-of-Life and Destituent Potential

Agamben’s Homo Sacer series was never intended as a traditional work of political philosophy which outlines its critique at the beginning and showcases the prospects for liberation at its end. As such, this fourth session will cover material written earlier in Agamben’s career as a political philosopher alongside the final work of the Homo Sacer series in order to elaborate the key concepts Agamben sees as capable of countering the repressive logics he opposes: form-of-life and destituent potential.

Core readings:

Agamben, Giorgio (2000), Means Without End: Notes on Politics (trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)

 - Chapter 1: Form-of-Life: pp. 3-12

Agamben, Giorgio (2016), The Use of Bodies (trans. Adam Kotsko) (Stanford: Stanford University Press)

- Section 3, §2, 3, 6, 7: pp. 207-219, 234-245

Agamben, Giorgio (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen) (Stanford: Stanford University Press)

- Threshold: pp. 42-44

Agamben, Giorgio (2016), The Use of Bodies (trans. Adam Kotsko) (Stanford: Stanford University Press)

- Epilogue: Toward a Theory of Destituent Potential: pp. 263-279

Lecture Five: Contemporary Interventions: COVID-19 and the Question of Palestine

The final session for this course will consider some of Agamben’s more recent interventions on contemporary political questions, particularly his writings on the COVID-19 pandemics and lockdowns, as well as his brief interventions on Israel and Palestine. We will consider how these interventions relate to (or potentially break away from) Agamben’s political philosophy outlined in the previous weeks and question the role of the philosopher in contemporary political crises.

Core readings:

Agamben, Giorgio (2021), Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics (trans. Valeria Dani) (London: ERIS)

- Chapters 1-5, 9, 13, 18, 20: pp. 11-25, 38-41, 55-58, 82-85, and 88-95

Agamben, Giorgio (30/10/2023), ‘The Silence of Gaza’, Quodlibet (trans. Paul Gorby): https://pgorby.wordpress.com/2023/10/30/giorgio-agamben-the-silence-of-gaza- translation/

Agamben, Giorgio (30/09/2024), ‘The End of Judaism’, Quodlibet (trans. Ill Will Editions): https://illwill.com/the-end-of-judaism

Agamben, Giorgio (07/11/2024), ‘The Exile and the Citizen’, Quodlibet (trans. Autonomies/Julius Gavroche): https://autonomies.org/2024/11/giorgio-agamben-the- exile-and-the-citizen/

Supplementary reading:

Gorby, Paul (2023), ‘The Biopolitics of Fear: Assessing Agamben’s Analysis of the COVID-19 Lockdowns’, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory. Online First: pp. 1-17

Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir (2012), ‘Abandoning Gaza’ in Marcelo Svirsky and Simone Bignall (ed.s), Agamben and Colonialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press): pp. 178-203

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System/Eroticism: Bataille’s Hegel

Lecturer: Lillian Phillips

This course is a return to one of the structuring problematics of 20^th century French thought; that is, the divergent (but always intimate) paths of literature and philosophy as they branch toward representing what lies on their borders. It will follow the overlapping philosophical/political/literary trajectories of Georges Bataille and Alexandre Kojève, with particular emphasis on the 1930s and 1940s. 

We will begin by contextualising each thinkers’ intellectual background prior to their meeting. We will then spend two weeks approaching Kojève’s seminar series—Hegel’s Religious Philosophy—at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, in which, from 1933–39, he executed his interpretation, translation, and commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Bataille dated his own attendance “From 1933 (I think) to 1939”, and most scholars agree that he was attending assiduously by 1934. Following this line, we will locate Bataille’s wartime writing as an historically singular convergence of Hegelian thought and literary-erotic form; a convergence which could only take place in response to the form of Hegelianism created by Kojève. We will end the course with a discussion of the implications of this convergence for the poststructuralists’ “taking-up” of Bataille after his death in 1962.

I would recommend this course to anyone looking for an introduction to Bataille or Kojève; to eroticism; to the variegated elements of 20^th century French Marxist-Hegelianism; or to the essential backdrop of the later poststructuralist fascination with lingual transgression, and the non-teleological revolutions of avant-gardist art. The problem of negativity-as-excess is now inextricable from the question of a teleological philosophy of History, and its possibility. The confrontation of Hegelian philosophy, with the philosophies (or ideologies) of desire, is the basis of this whole encounter. 

Week 1. France Before Hegel / Bataille Before Kojève / Kojève Before Bataille

In this first lecture, we will introduce the necessary biographical and intellectual context for the Bataille/Kojève encounter. We will begin by setting the scene of French philosophy (and politics) prior to the introduction of Hegel, with particular emphasis on the dominance of neo–Kantianism in its most prominent schools. We will then sketch out Bataille’s dalliances with Catholicism, Surrealism, and Marxism throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, alongside a foundational mysticism shared with Kojève (and the necessity of this mysticism for the latter’s reading of Hegel). We will also compare the alternate readings of Hegel put forward prior to Kojève’s seminars at the École Pratique des Haute Études, and the singularity of his intervention. 

Required Reading: 

• Badiou, Alain, et al. “Hegel in France.” The Adventure of French Philosophy, edited and translated by Bruno Bosteels, Verso, 2022, 19–25.

Suggested Reading: 

• Geroulanos, Stefanos. “Man Under Erasure: Introduction.” An Atheism That is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. Stanford University Press, 2010, pp. 130–72.
• Love, Jeff. “Introduction: A Russian in Paris.” The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève. Columbia University Press, 2018, 1–16. 
• Bataille, Georges. Story of the Eye. Penguin, 2001.

Week 2. The Encounter / L’Angoisse

This week, we will approach the beginning of Kojève’s lectures, focusing on the years 1933–1936, through his emphasis on Chapter IV of the Phenomenology, “Autonomy and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Mastery and Servitude” and its principal event: the initiation of human desire and recognition in the dialectic of master and slave. We will track Kojève’s communist turn; that is, the transformation of Hegel’s slave into the proletarian subject, who, through the labour of self-negation, acts to lead humanity towards the end of history in violent revolution. In reading “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel”, the final lectures of the 1933/4 academic year, we will also begin to think through the significance of l’angoisse for Kojève’s characterisation of the slave, and the relevance of this characterisation for Bataille’s later work. Here, we will introduce the significance of Martin Heidegger for Kojève’s thought and discuss the implications of Heidegger’s failure (as outlined by Kojève) to account for Struggle and Labour within a system of history. 

Required Reading:

• “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel” (Included as Appendix II of Introduction à la lecture de Hegel and translated into English by Joseph R. Carpino for interpretation in 1973).
• Hegel, G.W.F., “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage.” Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller, Oxford University Press, 1977.

Suggested Reading:

• Geroulanos, “Alexandre Kojève’s Negative Anthropology, 1931–1939.” An Atheism That is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. Stanford University Press, 2010, pp. 130–72.
• Butler, Judith. “Historical Desires: The French Reception of Hegel.” Subjects of Desire, Columbia University Press, 1987, 61–100. 

Week 3. The End of History

This week, we will reflect on the immediate impact of Kojève’s early lectures, particularly tracing their influence in Bataille’s shifting relation to Marxism, Nietzscheanism, his formation of the Acéphale group, and the College of Sociology. In doing so, we will read Bataille’s 1937 “Letter to X [A Lecturer on Hegel]” and discuss the significance of the concept of “unemployed negativity” for his developing theory of expenditure. We will also compare the representation of the master/slave dialectic in Kojève’s 1939 translation of and commentary on Chapter IV of the Phenomenology to “The Idea of Death in the Philosophy of Hegel”. Moving towards Kojève’s final lectures, prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, we will engage with his most famous proclamation—the End of History as a material experience of the 20^th century itself, manifest in the state formation of Stalinism. 

Required Reading:

• Kojève, “In Place of an Introduction.” Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Translated by James H. Nichols, Jr., edited by Allan Bloom, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1969, pp. 3–30. 
• Kojève, “Interpretation of the Third Part of Chapter VIII of the Phenomenology of Spirit (conclusion).” Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Translated by James H. Nichols, Jr., edited by Allan Bloom, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1969, pp. 150–68. 
• Bataille, “Letter to X, Lecturer on Hegel…Paris, December 6, 1937.” The College of Sociology (1937–9), edited by Denis Hollier, translated by Betsy Wing, vol. 41 of Theory and History of Literature, University of Minnesota Press, 1988, pp. 89–93.

4. System / Eroticism 

Following Kojève’s assertion of the End of History, we will now turn to Bataille’s writings from 1939–1941, primarily “Torture”, the central chapter of Inner Experience, and the erotic récit Madame Edwarda. We will outline the texts’ crucial inflection of a continued struggle with Kojève’s Hegel, the role of Nietzsche in the struggle, and the resulting possibility of a form of literary enunciation that, while remaining fixed under the gaze of philosophy, fixes its own graze on the procedures and conventions of philosophical systematization. We will think through the distinctions between the erotic and the pornographic, the suitability of either designation to Bataille’s work, and the actual function of transgression in a literary form which predicates itself on the explicit representation of sex. We will also touch on the Anti-Bataille—Jean-Paul Sartre—in his own response to the Kojèvian Hegel, and in his most explicit critique of Bataille—A New Mystic.

Required Reading: 

• Bataille, “Madame Edwarda” [my translation].
• Bataille, “Torture,” Inner Experience. Translated by Stuart Kendall, SUNY Press, 2014.

Recommended reading:

• Sartre, Jean-Paul. “A New Mystic.” On Bataille and Blanchot, translated by Chris Turner, Seagull Books, 2021, pp. 1–60.
• Sontag, Susan. “The Pornographic Imagination (1967).” Styles of Radical Will, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1987, pp. 35–74.

5. Bataille’s Hegel 

In this final week, we will follow Bataille’s addresses to Hegel throughout the 1950s, as can be read in his 1955 essay “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice”, and the 1956 preface to the re-published Madame Edwarda. We will touch on the representation of Hegel and transgression in 1953’s Erotism, before arriving at the point of Bataille’s death, and the subsequent issue of Critique—Hommage à Georges Bataille (1963). We will consider Michel Foucault’s contribution to that issue, “Preface to Transgression”, and its articulation of the process by which philosophy ostensibly became secondary to language; forced to experience its own limits in the mirror of the other’s transgression. Through this, we will begin to think through the complications of the Bataillean/Kojèvian/Hegelian inheritance for other central figures of French poststructuralism—Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers—and the essential role of that inheritance in all subsequent thought which positions itself across avant-gardist literature, the writing of experience, and philosophy. 

Required Reading:

• Bataille, “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice.” Translated by Jonathan Strauss, On Bataille, special issue of Yale French Studies, edited by Allan Stoekl, no. 78, 1990, pp. 9–28.
• Bataille, “Preface”, Madame Edwarda [1956].

Suggested Reading: 

• Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression (1963).” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, edited by Bouchard, translated by D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon, Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 29–52.
•  Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve.” Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, The University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 251–77.
• Nealon, Christopher. “Affect, Performativity, and Actually Existing Poetry.” Infinity for Marxists: Essays on Poetry and Capital, Brill, 2023, pp. 89–95.
• Bataille, “Sanctity, eroticism and solitude.” Erotism: Death and Sensuality, translated by Mary Dalwood, City Lights Books, 1986, pp. 252–64.

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Beyond the Dialectic: Hegel’s Speculative Philosophy

Lecturer: Gregory Marks

Thesis... antithesis... synthesis... That’s Hegel, right? Well, not exactly...

These lectures will provide an introduction to Hegel’s philosophy through an explication of the third moment of his thought—not the infamous ‘synthesis’ but what he calls ‘speculative’ thought. Beginning with Hegel’s comments on philosophical method, we will see how he places speculation alongside abstraction and dialectic as the other two moments of thought by which things are logically determined and opposed to one another. Following this thread, these lectures will examine how Hegel presents speculation as the moment of positive rationality, or of looking beyond contradiction, exclusion, and difference to find a conceptual unity underpinning these forms of separation. By taking the question of method as our starting point, the goal of this course is not only to show what Hegel meant, but to discover what strategies of reading are needed to make sense of his writings. 

Through the course of this investigation we will examine central works and concepts of the Hegelian corpus: the speculative proposition in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the dialectic of being and nothing in the Science of Logic, and the affinity of poetic and conceptual language in the Lectures on Fine Art. The analysis of these works will also open the way to a discussion of the problems of language and metaphysics in the post-Hegelian philosophies of R.G. Collingwood, Theodor Adorno, Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Derrida, Gillian Rose, and Catherine Malabou. 

Week 1 – Abstraction, Dialectic, Speculation

We will begin by examining the three ‘sides’ of logical thought as outlined in Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic: abstraction, dialectic, and speculation. We will see how Hegel opposes abstraction to the dull immediacy of the senses and defends it as a necessary starting point for thought. Then, we will see how the dialectic is placed as the negative moment of reason, which puts abstractions in relation to one another as contradictory terms. Lastly, we will see how speculative thought arrives as the positive moment of reason, which reveals the conceptual affinity of the terms despite their logical contradiction. 

Reading: 

• G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, trans. Brinkmann and Dahlstrom, §79-82. 

Week 2 – The Exhaustion of Form

In week two we will take on a close reading of one of the thorniest passages from the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel outlines the difference between ordinary language and philosophical meaning. Specifically, we will see how Hegel opposes the formal separation of terms in philosophical statements to the conceptual unity that they are supposed to express. Read dialectically, the form of the proposition alternates between its subject and predicate, prioritising one term over the other until it reaches a point of exhaustion and logical identity. From out of this dialectical impasse, the speculative reading emerges to express a unity implicit in the proposition’s formal separation. Though stated abstractly here in Hegel’s preface, we will see how this complex of language and meaning works as the motor behind the forms of consciousness that make up the Phenomenology.

Reading: 

• G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Inwood, §58-66. 

Suggested reading: 

• Theodor Adorno, “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel,” in Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Nicholsen, p. 89-148. 

Week 3 – Nothing Becomes of Nothing

The third week will turn to the opening of the Science of Logic and its infamous equation of being and nothing. We will see how how the initial dialectic between these two terms resolves in the third category of becoming and ask what the resulting triad means for Hegel’s logical method. By beginning with pure being, is the Logic a work of ontology? If being is the beginning, why does Hegel claim that this work has no presuppositions? By taking Hegel’s outlines of speculative thought in the Encyclopedia and the Phenomenology as our guides, we will work to answer these questions and come to an understanding of the critical perspective that marks the Logic as the turning point in the death and rebirth of modern metaphysics. 

Reading: 

• G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. Giovanni, p. 49-80. 

Suggested readings: 

• R.G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, p. 11-33. 
• Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in Writing and Difference, trans. Bass, p. 351-370. 

Week 4 – Language and Reality

Our penultimate lecture will revisit the problems of speculation in the Phenomenology via Hegel’s structuralist and poststructuralist commentators. Specifically, we will examine the role of language in Hegel’s philosophy from two angles. Firstly, we will ask who or what is the subject of speculative thought? Though Hegel privileges the events of human history in his philosophy of spirit, the subject that thinks this history is never exactly coterminous with any narrowly defined ‘humanity,’ allowing commentators such as Jean Hyppolite to speak of a reason that is expressed ‘across’ but not ‘through’ human discourse. Secondly, for whom does the speculative meaning of a proposition appear? Hegel gives no clear delineation between the language of ordinary thinking and speculative thought, suggesting only that the style of philosophy must be judged by its readers. For Catherine Malabou, this makes Hegel an author against authorial right, whose text is determined in its reading rather than its writing. Between these re-readings, we will attempt to do justice to not only the spirit but the letter of Hegel’s thought. 

Readings: 

• Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Lawlor and Sen, p. 129-148. 
• Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, trans. During, p. 167-183. 

Week 5 – Speculative Poetics

Finally, we will take on Hegel’s comments on the kinship between speculative and poetic thought, as discussed in his Lectures on Fine Art. We will see how Hegel defines poetic art as a play between form, content, style, and substance in the language of the work. We will also see how the speculative language examined in previous weeks compares with metaphorical and allegorical language, which likewise attempt to express conceptual unity in formal difference. This will lead us toward the wider questions of what the problems of literary interpretation have in common with philosophical thought, and whether a better understanding of poetics can help us to decipher not only Hegel’s works but philosophical writing more broadly. 

Reading: 

• G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art, trans. Knox, p. 971-996. 

Suggested reading: 

• Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 129-157.