THE MYSTICAL LIFE OF ETHICS

Credit Hours: 3 · Graduate

This is an advanced seminar, exclusive for graduate students, treating the intersection between the ethics of everyday life and the mystical and political frameworks within which this life unfolds. Ethics has often been understood as “morality” — what is right or wrong to do, following the rules and norms of one’s context. Instead, we will follow Michel Foucault and take up “ethics” as the everyday practices of relation to self and others that allow us to challenge norms and forge new ways of individual and collective life. We will trace the long history of the intersection between ethics as an everyday mystical practice, that connects individuals to their communities and to a sense of something “more” — whether in relation to the cosmos (Plato, Plotinus), to a divinely supported sociality (Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine), to a gender-breaking self-authorization (Marguerite Porete, Mechthild of Magdeburg), to queer resistance to social inscription (Foucault, Butler), to Black female self-care as political resistance (Audrey Lorde, Sylvia Wynter), to embodied practices that knit together the social and spiritual (Francisco Varela, Iris Marion Young).