PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS COURSE IS NO LONGER RUNNING. VIEW CURRENT COURSES HERE.
Parveen Adams, Sam Ashenden, Mark Cousins
This course proposes both a reading and a re-reading of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. The text has a canonic status within the Enlightenment, but in the twentieth century, both in terms of its conceptual order and its historical significance the text has become more equivocal. Given a series of human catastrophes in the twentieth century, to some the Kant text looked irrelevant. To others it looked perverse, even cruel. Above all it seemed to lack any grip on the extreme conditions of the century, conditions which seemed to require a strong idea of evil. Starting with Kant, the course goes on to both contemporary theoretical and psychoanalytic writings on guilt, obedience, sadism, pleasure and pain, and to filmic representations of Fascism and evil. Kant’s text is followed by Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents, which from their different positions raise the issue of guilt. The post-war use of Kant’s nightmare of radical evil as the paradox of the pursuit of wholly criminal objectives which are yet within the language and experience of ethics is powerfully developed by Hannah Arendt in Eichman in Jerusalem. Shadowing the Kantian system is that of de Sade. The fundamental system of Sade is reconstructed and is followed into the question of its visual representation in Pasolini’s Saló. The film is interrogated in terms of the spectator’s ratio of rejection and complicity and as a representation of hate. A second film, Dogville by Lars von Trier is discussed as a possible representation of evil. Finally the question of testimony, witness and representation is raised in respect to Primo Levi.
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS COURSE IS NO LONGER RUNNING. VIEW CURRENT COURSES HERE.
Seminars
1. Kant’s Theory of Ethics
The Basic Text
I. Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason (1788), CUP 1997
“ Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Part One) (1793), CUP 1998
A. Zupancic, Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan
2. Good and Evil (Screening: Peter Paymont’s ‘Shake Hands with the Devil’, 2004)
The Super-ego and Guilt
Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), CUP 1994
S. Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923), Standard Edition vol. XIX
“ ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’ (1930), Standard Edition vol XXI
A. Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow, MIT 2003
3. Radical Evil (Screening: Eyal Sivan’s ‘The Specialist’, 1999)
Radical evil and legal regulations
H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
Maria Pia Lara (ed), Rethinking Evil, California 2001 (CUP 1996)
4. The Sadean System (Screening: Lars von Trier’s ‘Dogville’, 2003)
Sadean Ethics
P. Klossowski, Sade My Neighbour, 1967 edition, Quartet Encounters, 1991
M. Hénaff, Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body (1978), Minnesota 1999.
Blanchot, ‘Sade’s Reason’ in The Blanchot Reader, ed. M. Holland, Blackwell 1995, pp74-99
J. Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-60),
5. The Representation of Sade’s Philosophy (Screening: Pasolini’s ‘Salo’, 1975)
Pasolini’s Salò
G Indiana, Saló or The 120 Days of Sodom, BFI Pub.2000
R. Barthes, ‘Pasolini’s Saló: Sade to the Letter’ in P. Willemen (ed) Pier Paolo Pasolini, BFI, 1977
Italo Calvino, ‘Sade is Within Us’, Stanford Italian Review, 1982, 2, Fall (202)
J. Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman, chs 5 and 8, MIT 2003
K. Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics ch 3, Minnesota 2001
6. Primo Levi (Screening: Errol Morris’s ‘Mr Death’, 1999)
P. Levi, If This Is A Man, Sphere Books, 1987 (1958)
“ The Truce, Abacus, 1987 (1963)
G. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, Zone books
G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford Univ Press 1998
General References
A. Daudet, In the Land of Pain, Jonathan Cape, 2002 (1930)
S. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Penguin 1985
Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom, Grove Press 1966
R. Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976 (1971) (D)
M. Lever, Marquis de Sade, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.
Ermanno Bencivenga, ‘Kant’s Sadism’, Philosophy and Literature, 20:1, Johns Hopkins 1996, pp. 39-46 (D)
J. Lacan, Kant With Sade, trans. James Swenson, October 51 (Winter1989), pp.55-104
S. Zizek, ‘Kant With (Or Against) Sade?’, New Formations, no 35, pp. 93-107, 1998 (D)
S. Zizek, Tarrying With the Negative, Duke University Press, 1993
Gary Indiana, Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom, BFI Publishing 2000
E. Siciliano, Pasolini, Random House 1982
P. P. Pasolini, ‘Stylistic Reaction’ in Stanford Italian Review 2, no 2, fall 1982
C.M. Tonetti, Bernardo Bertolucci: The Cinema of Ambiguity, Twayne Pub 1995
Fabien S. Gerard, Jefferson Kline, Bruce Sklarew (eds), Bernardo Bertolucci: Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, 2000
G. Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, Picador, 1996
J. Derrida, ’Force of Law’ repr in D. Cornell (ed) Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice
S. Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, Princeton 2002 (D)
