Inmanencia: Heidegger & Deleuze [Fall 2009]

Vía Syllabus

Doctoral seminar for Fall 2009, cross-listed in MCC and Comparative Literature
Time: Wednesdays from 2 - 4:10pm
Location: TBA

"Two starkly different thinkers, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) offer some of the most important theories of technology in the twentieth-century. Heidegger views technology insofar as it extends or departs from man's being in the world, while for Deleuze the world itself is filled with "machinic" entities, from the pervasive layers of the machinic phylum all the way up to desiring machines and war machines. In this doctoral seminar we will perform close readings of both authors, focusing on their analyses of technology, tools, objects, machines, art, dwellings, and media.

While Heidegger was coopted by deconstruction and Deleuze was often (incorrectly) labeled a poststructuralist, both writers are notable in that they are technically outside the core canon of "critical theory"--loosely defined as the Marxian and Freudian tradition of socio-cultural critique beginning with the Frankfurt School--while nevertheless remaining two of the most influential writers in that same theoretical tradition. Both Heidegger and Deleuze constructed entire philosophical projects that offer alternatives to the growing disorientation and alienation brought on by the technologies of modern life. For Heidegger it is the Greeks, particularly the presocratic philosophers, who gesture the way forward. For Deleuze it is a special minoritarian sub-category of philosophy, a cobbled-together bibliography of what might be called "radically materialist" philosophers hand-selected from throughout history (Heraclitus, Spinoza, Hume, Bergson, Whitehead, and so on).

Heidegger is, in Alain Badiou's recent assessment, the "last universally recognized philosopher." First we devote our attention to selections from Heidegger's Being and Time, in which he unifies subject and object under the banner of Dasein, that special mode of being ascribed to us. Next we consider Heidegger's later essays on technology, focusing on his treatment of tools, things, dwellings, and art.

Deleuze is perhaps best known for one of his collaborative books with Félix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus. We will read sections from this signal work, culminating with what is arguably the most important concept for understanding technological change over the last few decades, the rhizome. We will deepen our understanding of Deleuze's work with readings from his important early book on ontology, Difference and Repetition, as well as a book on technology and art from Deleuze's "aesthetic period" during the 1980s.

Additional readings from Alain Badiou, Donna Haraway, Graham Harman, G.W.F. Hegel, Luce Irigaray, Fredric Jameson, Karl Marx, and Samuel Weber."

Etiquetas: Deleuze