Messianic Critique

Messianic Critique is a Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies class taught by John Drabinski.

Course Description
How is one to think critically in the wake of mass-death? In the wake of catastrophic violence in Europe's twentieth-century, and the emergence of a suffocating mass culture industry, the very idea of critique and theoretical intervention is put in question. How can we conceive an interruption, even reversal, of such disastrous loss in a culture of anonymity? How is anonymity to be addressed from within language, culture, and the social order? This course pursues these questions with a cluster of theorists from Gershom Scholem to Jacques Derrida. Our focus will be the motif of messianism in German and French critical theory from the middle- to late-twentieth century. We will begin with the influential treatments of the Jewish conception of the messianic in Scholem's and Franz Rosenzweig's work, in order to set the stage for how later thinkers secularize the same notion. With Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno. Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida, and Maurice Blanchot as our guides, we will explore how a secularized Jewish conception of the messianic emerges and comes to function as central to the aesthetic, cultural, and political analyses of critical theory and deconstruction. Such an understanding is crucial for understanding the foundations of contemporary literary, social, cultural, and political theory.

Learning Goals

 * Writing
 * Reading
 * Presenting