Freud and Philosophy: Overcoming the Self and its aporias with Michael Pelias

In recent times, left schol­ars, mil­i­tants, and the­o­rists have returned to Marx in the hope of
find­ing the rev­o­lu­tion­ary truth. Although the study of Marx and his immense pro­duc­tion of
crit­i­cal analy­sis is nec­es­sary and demand­ing, it alone can­not replace the more cur­rent
the­o­ret­i­cal inter­ven­tions of the mid­dle twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry through the first two decades of the
21st cen­tu­ry. This course will focus on three of the most orig­i­nal con­tem­po­rary ver­sions of
Marx­ism which have tak­en into account cur­rent con­di­tions. We will encounter and focus on the
exem­plary and orig­i­nal work of the Frank­furt School, Hen­ri Lefeb­vre, and Anto­nio Negri. The
hope is to think in our times with new con­cepts and cat­e­gories need­ed for under­stand­ing and
mak­ing rad­i­cal change.

In this course, we exam­ine the metaphysics/ontology of indi­vid­u­a­tion, rup­ture, sin­gu­lar­i­ty, and time. Indeed, the ques­tion that starts philo­soph­i­cal think­ing (What is it?) is not only the ques­tion about the essence of real­i­ty, the what­ness of things, but it is also the ques­tion of the process of indi­vid­u­a­tion, change, and ulti­mate­ly of sin­gu­lar­i­ty. The sec­ond, but more foun­da­tion­al, ques­tion, asked by Par­menides (Is it or is it not?), will, per­haps para­dox­i­cal­ly, pro­vide us with the crit­i­cal tools for an under­stand­ing of the dialec­tics of exis­tence, the vor­tex of becom­ing described by Her­a­cli­tus. The rela­tion­ship between being and becom­ing, per­ma­nence and change (Par­menides and Her­a­cli­tus) will be cen­tral through­out the course. This is the ques­tion of time, which we will prob­lema­tize start­ing from the orig­i­nal thought of Anax­i­man­der. Yet, the point is to also appre­ci­ate the impor­tance of this ear­ly think­ing for (and in) our own times. We will also make ref­er­ence to oth­er philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions, such as Tao­ism in Chi­na.

Giv­en the mul­ti­ple Left, Lib­er­al and Neo-con­ser­v­a­tive inter­pre­ta­tions of Ger­man ide­al­ism in terms of the end(s) of his­to­ry and or its new begin­ning, we will inter­pret the world his­tor­i­cal spir­it 1. in the light of the enlight­en­ment 2. a close read­ing of Hegel’s Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy engage the con­tem­po­rary world and its mul­ti­ple vari­a­tions. By think­ing through the after­math of the clo­sure of West­ern philo­soph­i­cal thought and its mean­ing for the neo-lib­er­al epoch, we will encounter some of the poet­ic respons­es to this clo­sure and the attempts made philo­soph­i­cal­ly to reori­ent thought. Authors read will include Kant, Hegel, Mal­larme, and Rim­baud among oth­ers.