ANTHR 4428 - [Derrida: Derrida as Critical Reader]

(crosslisted) COML 4428, GERST 4428, JWST 4428
(CA-AS)

Fall. Next offered 2017-2018. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Permission of instructor required. Co-meets with ANTHR 7428/COML 6428/GERST 7428/JWST 7428.

J. Boyarin.

We will read together a broad range of modern European texts–mostly but not exclusively by at least nominally Jewish authors, many of them working in the Germanic intellectual tradition–accompanied by a range of works by Jacques Derrida that engage those thinkers and their texts. Authors we engage will likely include Theodor W. Adorno, Saint Augustine, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, Helene Cixous, Hermann Cohen, Sigmund Freud, Edmond Jabes, Emanuel Levinas, Claude Levi-Strauss, Karl Marx, and Gershom Scholem. We will thus be better able to participate in the current re-evaluation of Derrida’s legacy, including his Jewishness, and we will read him, among other things, as a proponent of dialogue, sometimes loving and sometimes fiercely agonistic.