- Course Pages
- Intensity and the Ordinary: Sex, Death, Aggression and Guilt
- With a focus on Civilization and its Discontents, we examine how Freud’s theories tried to expose profound instincts as they appeared in daily life.
- Intensity and the Ordinary: Art, Loss, Forgiveness
- A reading of Virginia Woolf’s modernist novel To the Lighthouse shows how giving up the search for the “really real” can liberate one to attend to the everyday.
- The Postmodern Everyday
- We go back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and forward to Ludwig Wittgenstein to consider how forms of life and language games need to foundation to be compelling.
- From Critical Theory to Postmodernism
- Through a consideration of Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno along with Michel Foucault, we confront the philosophical effort to escape from totality in order to understand the politics of control.
- Paintings II
- A very brief consideration of how artists are responding to the loss of foundations to produce work that redefines art.
- Postmodern Identities
- We examine short pieces by Judith Butler and Slavjo Zizek to understand how identities get formed (and performed) in a world without foundations.
- Late-term Review
- Review of all the thinkers we have studied in Parts I and II of the class, along with some complementary material.
- Postmodern Pragmatisms
- After postmodern playfulness, or alongside it, we see the resurgence of the pragmatic impulse to return philosophy to real human problems.
- Extra (Optional) Writing Assignment
