PHILOSOPHY 448: TOPICS IN 20TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY (ECONOMY)

X1 First Term W 18:00-21:00 K. Houle
By way of an introduction to recent continental thought, we will examine the treatment of "economy" by thinkers such as Freud, Bataille, Mauss, Irigaray, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Kristeva Cixous, Lévinas, Bourdieu, Zizek, Foucault, Blanchot and Cornell. These philosophers of "the limit" are all, in some way, resisting the ontology and practices of economy exemplified by the Hegelian logic of identity: the unity of Meaning and Being within the circle of the Absolute. Further, these projects of philosophizing the limit are, to quote Drucilla Cornell, "driven by an ethical desire to enact the ethical relation. By the ethical relation I mean to indicate the aspiration to a nonviolent relationship to the Other, and to otherness more generally, that assumes responsibility to guard the Other against the appropriation that would deny her difference and singularity." The charge is that the restricted economy of idealism, despite even its best efforts (eg. Habermasian communicative rationality and Rawlsian fairness) cannot secure responsibility to otherness, and hence, cannot enact justice. In investigating this general claim, we will study these key terms: the supplement, alterity, différance, the limit, jouissance, absence, excess, the Outside, trace, the gift. By organizing our reading of recent continental thinking ("French Feminism", "Post-Structuralism", "Deconstruction") around the question of reconceiving economy, we will discover how, despite charges to the contrary, all such efforts are grounded in and driven by the ethical and the political.
Texts: TBA