ANTHR 4428 - Reading Derrida and Others

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

Fall. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Co-meets with ANTHR 7428/COML 6428/FREN 6428/GERST 7428/JWST 7428.

J. Boyarin.

We will read together a wide range of modern European texts-mostly but not exclusively by at least nominally Jewish authors, many of them working in the German intellectual tradition–accompanied by a range of works by Jacques Derrida that engage those thinkers and their texts. Authors will likely include Theodor w. Adorno, Saint Augustine, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, Helene Cixous, Hermann Cohen, Sigmund Freud, Edmond Jabes, Emannuel 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.