General Information
Course Description
9508 - The Fingerprint of Spirit - What remains of spirit after the deconstruction of metaphysics? On one hand we might detail and deplore its lapse into sheer ideology at the hands of the Right and various fundamentalisms; on the other we might mark and re-mark its sublimation into the commodity form. Yet if the concept of spirit in philosophy and theory has been largely junked, it has also re-emerged in the form of the spectre, thanks to Derrida's Spectres of Marx (and the more anodyne deployments of spectrality of those who have followed him). For Derrida the ghost is less a trope than an instance of the irreducibility of thought and even history to older binaries of idealism and materialism, repetition and revolution, tradition and progress; and this irreducibility argues for a return to spirit and a return of spirits. Working both within and without this logic, we will begin to unravel an occluded genealogy of spirit, paying special attention to the extent to which from Kant and particularly Hegel on, spirit seems never to have been pure ideality: to borrow from Adorno, spirit leaves fingerprints, material traces that attest to the continuing traffic between the ideal and the material. Among some of the Hegelian construals of spirit we will trace are spirit in its subjective, objective and absolute flavours; spirit as intoxication, as enthusiasm, as utopian and as revolutionary; spirit's implication in the political opposition of Weltgeist and Weltanschauung; and spirit's negations and contraries, such as the body and depression. Readings will include selections from the following:
- Kant, Dreams of a Spirit Seer
- Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit; Aesthetics
- Schelling, Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom
- Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
- Marx, Critique of Hegel's Dialectic of Right; The German Ideology; The Communist Manifesto
- Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
- Weber, Protestant Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism
- Benjamin, “Goethe's Elective Affinities”; “On Hashish”; “Hashish in Marseilles”
- Adorno, Metaphysics; Negative Dialectics; Aesthetic Theory; Minima Moralia
- Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature; The Principle of Hope
- Bataille, Inner Experience
- Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age
- Derrida ,Of Spirit; Spectres of Marx
- Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative; The Muses
