Also listed as L-8866 S.
Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the great masters of suspicion from the nineteenth century, radically challenged the way we think and engage the world. Nietzsche’s writings and thought had a tremendous influence across the disciplines, upending many—especially philosophy, political thought, philology, and critical theory—and significantly marking others, such as law, anthropology, and the humanities. A number of contemporary critical thinkers in the 20th century—Georges Bataille, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Sarah Kofman, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Ali Shariati, and others—drew inspiration from Nietzsche’s writings and developed a strand of critical theory that has had great influence in disciplines as varied as history, law, philology, and the theory of science. These twentieth century thinkers helped forge a unique Nietzschean strand of contemporary critical thought.
In some disciplines, such as philosophy and political theory, the critical influence of Nietzsche’s thought has been analyzed and explored along many dimensions—epistemological, moral, political, and aesthetic, among others. In other disciplines, though, Nietzsche’s influence has been less well understood and studied. As Peter Goodrich and Mariana Valverde note, in their edited collection Nietzsche and Legal Theory: Half-Written Laws (Routledge, 2005), many other scholars have read Nietzsche “not so well,” “rather hurriedly, and through secondhand accounts.” As a result, certain disciplines have missed some of the central critical insights of Nietzsche—including his trenchant critique of “the timeless transcendent value of natural law theory,” as well as his equally cutting critique of “the comparably timeless Kantian ideal of freedom.” (Goodrich and Valverde, at 2).
The purpose of this seminar is to explore the rich tradition of contemporary critical thought that has emerged in the wake of Nietzsche. In other words, to explore Nietzschean critical thought in contrast, say, to the Marxian or Freudian traditions. The seminar will proceed through a close reading of the writings on or influenced by Nietzsche of Bataille, Heidegger, Blanchot, Césaire, Senghor, Arendt, Fanon, Deleuze, Klossowski, Foucault, Kofman, Derrida, Irigaray, Cixous, Shariati, and others, with the purpose of excavating critical insights across the disciplines and formulating a coherent Nietzschean strand of contemporary critical thought. This graduate student seminar will thus explore thirteen contemporary critical thinkers from the 20th century who engaged Nietzsche’s thought to challenge our critical thinking across a number of disciplines in social thought, law, and the humanities.
The graduate student seminar will be structured to frame a series of 13 formal seminars (the “formal seminars” or “Nietzsche 13/13”) at which two guests, from different disciplines, will be invited to discuss the readings and present on the themes of the seminar. Each formal seminar will host two specialists from across the disciplines, one from Columbia University and one from outside campus. It will also frame and interrelate with a Paris Reading Group that will run alongside the seminar. (See Paris Reading Group below). The graduate student seminar thus will serve as the vehicle to enrich the formal seminars and support the intellectual apparatus that will accompany the formal seminars. It will also prepare entries for the blog of the formal seminars, host the scholars invited to participate in the formal seminars, and prepare questions and comments for the formal seminars. It will serve as the structure that will nourish the formal seminar series. This seminar will also function as an advanced graduate research seminar. We will form four or five research clusters that will conduct on-going research in coordination with the formal seminars.
