Department of Spanish and Portuguese

VT: Heidegger’s Being & Time: History & the Darkening of the World

Martin Heidegger’s 1927 opus magnus Being and Time develops themes and concerns that have become indispensable for intellectual traditions including Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxism and post-Marxism, deconstruction, subaltern and postcolonial studies, and feminism: Dasein and thrownness; being-toward-death; finitude and quasi-transcendence; temporalization and historicity; the ontico-ontological difference; the history of metaphysics and its closure; and so on. One focal point for the seminar is what Heidegger calls world. This term is a central node in Heidegger’s conceptual vocabulary. While in our everyday language we tend to treat “world” as the most obvious of all referents, for Heidegger “world” names a network that only rarely becomes apparent to us. It is the horizon within which beings disclose themselves to and act in relation to one anothe. Yet as the conditioning possibility for thinking, speaking and acting, world remains inaccessible to thought. Indeed, it would seem that world only becomes available to us as a “thing”—not an object, but as a matter, as something we can mull over and concern ourselves with—in those moments when its integrity and its stability has become doubtful. The seminar will bring Heidegger’s treatment of world and its limits into conversation with contemporary debates concerning the precariousness of our world (e.g., Jean-Luc Nancy, Carlo Galli, and Saskia Sassen on globalization, violence and destruction; Claire Colebrook on climate change and extinction).

HISP-S 695     #33038     3:10P-5:40P        M         JH A107        Prof. Patrick Dove

Note: This S695 is combined with CTIH-T600