CSLC 203 Being-With: The Politics, and Poetics, of Community
It is impossible, the philosopher Martin Heidegger once declared, for any human being ever to be truly alone; to exist as a human at all, he argued, is always already to be acting and thinking and feeling in relation to other humans, to be interpreting our own being in relation to those who likewise, and reciprocally, must interpret their being in relation to ours. In this class, we shall examine the ways in which various philosophers and theorists over the last several centuries have conceived this mutually entangled condition of togetherness, this common existential condition of Being-With. We shall inquire, for example, into the ways this condition of shared being has been interpreted politically (in terms of entities such as city-state and nation-state), sociologically (through notions such as community and society), economically (through concepts such as markets and labor), and anthropologically (through the concepts of kinship group, family, and tribe). What shall distinguish this class from those to be found in any number of social science departments, however, is the close attention we shall be paying to the crucial role of culture, the role of literature in particular, in the making (and unmaking, and remaking) of all these ways of relating ourselves to one another. Or to put it somewhat more pithily (and alliteratively): how exactly do poetics relate to politics, and politics to poetics, in the shaping of a shared human existence? This course shall survey some of the most important ways of answering this question in the modern era. Students can therefore expect to study a wide array of social and cultural theorists from the 17th century forward, including (but not limited to) figures such as Hobbes and Vico, Rousseau, and Smith; Hegel and Marx, Malthus and Mill; Durkheim and Weber, de Beauvoir and Adorno; Fanon and Bourdieu, Turner and Geertz: Habermas and Rorty, Nussbaum and Butler; Nancy and Agamben, Appiah and al-Gharbi.