Post-Secular Investigations: Philosophy, Literature, and Language in the Age of Re-Enchantment
—A Lecture Series by Professor Creston Davis
This lecture series will be held every Tuesday at the University Lecture Hall (Katowice) at 4:30 starting October 9th.
Lecture I: Introduction—Transcending the Secular
Key Words & Methodology
(a) Post-Secularism
(b) Philosophy and Transcendence
(c) The Literary Imagination
(d) Re-Enchantment
A tentative thesis: The secular and the theological are insufficient categories and have resulted in a deadlock that I will propose to (a) identify; and (b) transcend.
Lecture II & III: Figures (The Subject of Trans-Subjectivity: the groundwork)
(a) Derrida
(b) Milbank
(c) Zizek
Texts: Derrida, Acts of Religion
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory
Zizek, The Monstrosity of Christ & Less Than Nothing
Lecture IV: Themes (Death is Not En Vogue)
(a) The Death of Death (Paul vs. Heidegger)
(b) Beyond the Deadlock of Modernism
(c) Deleuze and Turmoil
Texts: St. Paul (selections from the New Testament)
Heidegger, Being and Time
Alain Badiou, Being and Event (I & II)
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Lecture V: Redefining Philosophy
(a) What is Philosophy? (Deleuze)
(b) Spinoza and Post-Secularism (Toni Negri)
(c) The Veil of Fears! Nietzsche and the Last Man
(d) Is Nietzsche “post-secular”?
Texts: Deleuze, What is Philosophy?
Negri, Spinoza for our Time
Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals
Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time
Lecture VI-VII: Language, Literature, and Subjectivity, or; “How Does Zizek read Literature?”
Texts: Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis
Slavoj Zizek (unpublished writings)
Lecture VIII-IX: Theology and Psychoanalysis, or; “Can the Therapist Save Us?”
Texts: Slavoj Zizek Paul’s New Moment
Marcus Pound Theology and Psychoanalysis
Creston Davis, Clayton Crockett, and Marcus Pound Theology after Lacan (forthcoming)
Lecture X: Post-Secularism Towards Some Conclusions
Texts: Creston Davis, Truth after the Death of Meaning
Katerina Kolozova The Cut of the Real
Francois Laruelle, ChristOFiction (forthcoming in my series at Columbia University)
So you promise to transcribe them for us? Or make a youtube? Or tape? or book? Please. I can’t stand it that I won’t be there to hear them.
Any of the aforementioned ways are clearly welcome! Make someone to make a video of your lectures, please!
**Lecture IV: Themes (Death is Not En Vogue)
halloween edition: you gonna go as dasein, angst-engendering other, aletheia? seems like m hei’s abandoned his project to “stagger” bad repetition by 1936-7; his //s&z// falls like paul’s churchorgan to hegemonic consistency. wonder if you suggest how deleuzian differencevent ontology proffers a better road than nazism, christianity. this toe-to-toe twixt heidegger and paul, what’s the beef? some thing like pitting presence against historical materialism?
i asked the many heideggerians in my depo what they think of badiou’s take on ereignis/event. they dunno and so, people who haven’t yet want to think this through. thank you