Instructor: C. Tsoukalas
This seminar will address some of the political and ideological implications of the recent emergence of “cultural self-determination” as a fundamental human right. Its central object will refer to the increasing tension between hegemonically crystallized collective values emanating from contractually conceived “civic universalism,” on the one hand, and personalized individual values founded on particularist “anthropological” differences (gender, race, culture, language, etc.), on the other. However, the burning issues of alterity and multiculturalism as well as struggles for recognition will not be examined just philosophically. They will be treated as historical “discursive facts” produced together with the advent of globalization and within the context of ongoing radical mutations of traditionally closed, homogenous, and integrated political and ideological spaces.
Readings will include, Agamben, Althusser, Badiou, Balibar, Baumann, Bourdieu, Deleuze/Guattari, Derrida, Foucault, Freud, Girard, Hart/Negri, Levi-Strauss, Rorty, Rosanvallon, Schmitt, Taylor.
