Critical Theory Emphasis

This seminar continues the reflection on witnessing started in the past several years.  We will interrogate the experience of witnessing on this side of its narrative dimension, as an experience of "moral conscience" and of existential responsibility:  as the question of the "appeal" of conscience, of the pledge and the oath, of truth, lie, and perjury.  We will also elaborate, in new directions, 1) the problematic of survival, i.e. both of the being-unto-death and of the testamentary structure of the space of witnessing, and 2) the problematic of technical reproduction:  in what does the act of bearing witness, which should take place in one's own voice and in the first person, necessarily imply the recourse to some technical means?

All these questions will be treated in relation to that of fiction, especially of literary fiction.  What is the relationship between literature and the truth of witnessing?

This year's additions to the bibliography:
John Donne, Paradoxes and Problems. Ed. Helen Peters.
Shakespeare, Hamlet.
Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse.  English: Beyond Good and Evil, Tr. Walter Kaufmann.
---. "Erkenntnistheoretische Einleitung über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne."  In Werke, Ed. Schlechta, Vol. 3, or in Kritische Studienausgabe, Eds. Colli and Montinari, Vol. 1.  English: "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," in Philosophy and Truth, Tr. Daniel Breazeale, or in Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, Trs. and Eds. Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, David J. Parent.
---. Die Geburt der Tragödie.  English: The Birth of Tragedy, Tr. Walter Kaufmann.
Heidegger, Identität und Differenz.  English: Identity and Difference, Tr. Joan Stambaugh.
---. Sein und Zeit.  English: Being and Time.  Tr. Johne Macquarrie and Edward Robinson.   (Especially paragraphs 1-10 and 53-60).
Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu: La prisonnière, passages on the deaths of Bergotte and   Swann.  Paris:  Pléiade-Gallimard, Vol. 3, pp. 182-201. English: Remembrance of Things Past: The Captive, Tr. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin.
Benjamin, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" in  Illuminationen. English:  "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"  in Illuminations, Tr. Harry Zohn.
Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought.
Jean Genet, Un captif amoureux.  English: Prisoner of Love.  Tr. Barbara Bray.
Maurice Blanchot, L'instant de ma mort.
Sonia Combe, Archives inedites.  Les peurs françaises face à l'histoire contemporaine