6 credits | Prof. Beth HARPER
“The body fills us with loves and desires and fears and all sorts of fancies and a great deal of nonsense, with the result that we literally never get an opportunity to think at all about anything (Plato, Phaedo, 66c).”
This course unearths a history of the (Western) subject through interrogating the voices of the classical past. It explores the turn to antiquity in thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Judith Butler, Derrida and Foucault, amongst others, as both a political and an ethical act. In our reading of literary and philosophical thinkers of the 20th and 21st centuries, we shall explore themes such as desire and repression, disruption and critique, exile and difference as these thinkers themselves engage with the enigmatic and endlessly rich corpus of the Platonic dialogues, and Greek tragedy. Through a kind of archaeology of antiquity, the course will suggest new forms of conceiving of the subject’s relation to itself, to others, and to power. It will problematize normative concepts of the self, family and society – both ancient and modern- while stressing the uncanniness of human beings, and the wondrous transformative potential of reading ancient texts as creatures of modernity.
Assessment: 100% coursework.