GOVT 6426

Contemporaries Read Ancients

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2019-2020.

Contemporaries Read Ancients has twin pedagogic goals. The first is to deepen the understanding of antique thought and build upon prior study of canonical texts (Phaedrus, Republic, Nicomachean Ethics); the second is to introduce the work of contemporary continental thinkers (Agamben, Badiou, Caverero, Derrida, Irigaray, Kofman). These projects are interwoven ones. For, while continental thought (especially its contemporary avatars) have often elaborated their philosophic projects and concepts through a close reading of the ancients, graduate curricula have often kept them as separate objects of inquiry. At the same time, a new generation of N. American political theorists have built upon these continental philosophemes (khora, pharmakon, parrhesia; energeia) to open ancient texts to proximate political -theoretic issues such as immigration, translation, the interrelation of aesthetics and philosophy, matters of "free" democratic speech. This semester we will focus upon French and Italian thinkers and subject them to a double reading. To what extent are their philosophic projects unthinkable without the ancients? How might these ancient texts in turn both enable but also resist recuperation? How might both strands-contemporary and ancient- inform our present?

When Offered Fall.

Course Subfield (PT)

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