20th Century European PHIL

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

In the 20th Century, European philosophers increasingly turned their attention to what Emmanuel Levinas called the “widow, orphan or stranger” – that which is excluded from the inside, other to the self, foreign to the familiar, or outlaw to the law. In a variety of different contexts, many philosophers sought to thematise this ‘outside’, to understand its constitutive yet destabilising relationship to the ‘inside’, and to explore the ethical implications of this relationship. In this course, we will trace this theme in European philosophy in the 20th and early 21st Centuries (especially in French-language philosophy, and especially in the latter half of the 20th Century). We will read essays and excerpts from authors such as Ricoeur, Barthes, Derrida, Levinas, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Beauvoir, Kristeva, and Agamben. Students will be exposed to hermeneutics, post-structuralism, deconstruction, philosophical interpretations of psychoanalysis, French feminism, the ‘theological turn’ and speculative realism. Prior familiarity with these or related philosophical traditions is neither necessary nor expected. Assessment will likely include a 2000w textual analysis, a 2000w analysis of a cultural artifact, a final 3000w conference paper, and regular contribution of discussion questions. All texts will be provided.