CSLC 295 Special Topics in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture

Topics vary semester to semester. The object of any of the courses in the series entitled “Hear Now” is to introduce students to the transformative effect that contemporary artists and thinkers can have on the way we think about our world-- its past, its present its future.

Hear Now: Jean Luc Nancy and the Aesthetics of Community

In this class, we shall be examining the work of one the world’s most important living philosophers, Jean Luc Nancy. Special emphasis will be placed on the close relation Nancy seeks to draw between our so-called “private” aesthetic experiences—the painting that arrests us, the bar of melody that makes us tremble, the line of poetry that haunts us—and our sense of “being in community” (the sense, that is, that our supposedly singular existence is always already plural, is always already shared out with others). Beyond the reading of Nancy’s own works, we shall also be looking at the work of some of his most important predecessors on the question of art’s relation to the community (Kant, Hegel, Benjamin, Adorno), as well as the works of those thinkers who have engaged most directly with his ideas (Derrida, Agamben, Esposito), and those who have explicitly sought to oppose him (Ranciere, Badiou, and others).