General Information
Course Description
9595 - Re-Thinking the Possibility of "Unity" - Thinkers like Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard and Deleuze have argued that modern concepts and structures of unity are no longer viable insofar as they undermine contemporary politics, science, philosophy, writing and history. The grand-narratives of unity have been dismissed as totalizing and violent, excluding the play of difference at work in the life and thinking of human beings and their worlds. The contemporary thinker Alain Badiou is also critical of the tradition of thinking unity as a “Platonic One.” His project consists in not only rethinking the nature of the multiple but he also wishes to rethink unity in terms of a s a “counting as one” that avoids the pitfalls and violence of traditional theories of unity. One must not only give an account of difference, impossibility and undecidability at play in multiplicity but one must also try and account for the possibility of sets of relations and worlds that can be counted as one. This course will examine theories of unity that aim at rethinking the problem of unity and multiplicity in light of and “post” theories of sheer multiplicity and difference. Thinkers to be studied include: Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy. We shall also explore various fields and disciplines to see how unity is being rethought; we shall look at developments in science, art, politics, women’s studies, and philosophy.
WEEK I: Thinkers of Unity: Excerpts from: Plato (Republic, Parmenides), Parmenides (Fragments), Galileo (Books I-III, Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems), Hegel (The Great Logic)
Week II: Critics and Thinkers of Difference: Heraclitus, Giordano Bruno (Cause, Principle, Unity), Nietzsche (Genealogy of Morals); Heidegger (The ontological difference and ontotheology: excerpts from Being and Time)
WEEK III: Postmodern Difference: Derrida (“Différance”), Lyotard (Parts of Différand) and Deleuze (parts of Difference and Repetition)
WEEK IV: Rethinking Unity: Counting as One: Excerpts from Alain Badiou’s Being and Event
Week V: Badiou continued: Logics of Worlds and Metapolitics (excerpts)
Week VI: Life as Unifying: Excerpts from Giorgio Agamben (excerpts from Homo sacer and The State of Exception) and Michel Henry (Introduction: The Essence of Manifestation and parts on Life in Incarnation)
Week VII: Politics, Judgement and Unity: Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy and Life of the Mind
Week IX: Globalisation and the new, emerging “world”: Jean-Luc Nancy-Mondialisation, Martha Nussbaum’s essays on cosmopolitanism, Zygmunt Bauman’s Globalization
Week X: Race: K. Anthony Appiah, “Narrative Identities”; Iris Young, "Social Movements and the Politics of Difference"; excerpts from: Jorge J.E. Gracia, Surviving Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century and bell hooks’ Salvation: Black People and Love
Week XI: Gender: Excerpts from: Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression; Jean N. Harvey, Civilized Oppression; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
Week XII: Art: Catherine Malabou on plasticity: excerpts from The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic; Hélène Cixous: parts of Dream I Tell You and Tancredi Continues; excerpts from the writings/music of Pierre Boulez
Week XIII: Science: Parts of: Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social- An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory and Michel Serres’ The Parasite and Genesis
