Courses

After his Fall 2017 class on the “68 Effect in French Philosophy”, Professor Etienne Balibar will continue his series on 20^th century French Philosophy with a class on Derrida and His Others. The project aims at reading in depth some important texts from a major French philosopher, while using again as a guiding thread a comparison with contemporary “others” who seem to have addressed the same question albeit from an antithetic point of view. The reading becomes therefore at the same time more dialogical and more revealing of the articulation between situation and discourse. It will be realized in three steps, as follows:

1) Derrida with Althusser on the question of historicity (focusing on their respective seminars on Heidegger and Marx  in 1964-65, with additional references to Hegel, Benjamin and Blanchot);

2) Derrida with Deleuze on the question of alterity, focusing on their analyses of linguistic difference (with additional references to Arendt, Levinas, Lacan);

3) Derrida with Habermas on the question of cosmopolitanism and hospitality (taking its starting point from the confrontation organized by Giovanna Borradori after 9/11 of 2001, which gave rise to the book Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 2003) (with additional references to Schmitt, Arendt, Agamben).