General Information
Course Description
9503 - Deconstruction Before and After Poststructuralism - This course will focus on two areas: i) the (dis)continuities between phenomenology and a deconstruction in whose formation it played a seminal role, and ii) the turn, under the influence of Saussure and structuralism, from a phenomenological deconstruction still concerned with consciousness and the subject to a (post)structuralism ascetically committed to linguistic models. In studying the relationship among phenomenology, deconstruction and "post-structuralism," we shall try to recover the legacy of phenomenology for contemporary theory, and to analyse ther psychic and cultural investments of "post-structuralism." The course will begin by dealing with the phenomenology of Sartre and (much more briefly) Husserl and Heidegger, and will explore the ways in which deconstruction emerges in the difference between these theorists. Particular emphasis will be given to the seminal and forgotten role of Sartre in the "translation" of German idealism into French theory, and to the interstitial place of Blanchot and Levinas in the transition from phenomenology to deconstruction. We will continue by studying the work of De Man, Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard. Particular emphasis will be given to the early work of these writers, and to the ways it differs from their much more well-known later texts, as well as to the turn to post-structuralism that occurs after these early texts. The course will conclude by considering, briefly, the afterlife of deconstruction and its relation to "postHeideggerian" thought.
