We shall use Miller's translation. Secondary sources will be recommended, but a strong emphasis shall be placed upon a hermeneutic approach, i.e. direct engagement with the text more to understand its various levels and ambiguities than to rush to judgment about the many claims Hegel makes. Use of the original German is encouraged, but not required. Focusing on the cinematic movement known as neorealism, the course will also consider its literary manifestations and its theoretical underpinnings. This course will trace a history of signs, using Greek divination as the primary.
Emphasis is on major schools and trends in America, Britain, and France.
620.301 Twentieth-century European intellectual history has been marked by an acute sense of historical rupture with the past. This sensibility has led to a highly self-conscious exploration of the condition of modernity, and central to this sustained discourse of modernity has been the question of modern subjectivity. The issue of the human subject, especially skepticism of received models of subjectivity, has come to dominate present discussion in the humanities. Frequently, however, this contemporary theoretical interrogation proceeds without much reference to the deeper history of the modern debate about human subjectivity. Beginning with a consideration of Hegel and Marx, the course will proceed to readings from Nietzsche, Freud, Simmel, Durkheim, Freud, Heidegger, Foucault, Habermas, Castoriadis, and Lacan.