Courses of Study 2015-2016 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
Courses of Study 2015-2016 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

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GERST 6490 - Collapse of the Secular Future

(crosslisted) ANTHR 6890 , COML 6893 , JWST 6990 , NES 6990     
     


Spring. 4 credits.

P. Fleming, J. Boyarin.

Formations of progressive or revolutionary hope have become increasingly rare and are often replaced, for many working out of the German critical tradition, by critique of Enlightenment. This seminar articulates three related premises:

1) That what we call “modernity” is characterized by a forward-looking ethic that tries to ensure the arrival of a better, secular future – one that is somehow promised us;

2) That, through a series of blows to the dominance of Europe, the inevitability and perhaps even the possibility of that secular future are no longer readily available to the imagination; and

3) That the catastrophe of Germany and of the Jews (related to the dialectic of Christendom and the Jews) is a central symptom of the collapse of the secular future.



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