John Drabinski

Biography
PROFESSOR DRABINSKI IS NOW PERMANENTLY APPOINTED AT AMHERST COLLEGE, IN THE DEPARTMENT OF BLACK STUDIES

John Drabinski is visiting assistant professor of philosophy and critical theory. He received his A.B. from Seattle University in 1991 and a Ph.D. from University of Memphis in 1996 with a thesis on the work of Emmanuel Levinas. He has since written over two dozen articles on phenomenology, post-modernism, and political theory, in addition to the books Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas (2001) and Godard Between Identity and Difference (2008). John is currently at work on two book-length studies, one of Édouard Glissant’s poetics entitled Abyssal Beginnings: On Philosophy and the Middle Passage and another on Levinas and postcolonial theory entitled Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other. As well, he is editing a book Between Levinas and Heidegger (2010) and special issues of Journal of French Philosophy on "Godard and Philosophy" and of The C.L.R. James Journal on "The Work of Édouard Glissant."

He is jointly appointed with the Department of Black Studies at Amherst College, where he teaches Caribbean and African-American philosophy, literature, and political theory. Beginning Fall 2010 he will teach exclusively at Amherst College.

Education
(1991) A.B. Philosophy, Seattle University, Seattle, WA (Magna Cum Laude, Great Books Program)

Senior Thesis: "The Pure Stuff of Experience in James and Husserl" (published in Journal of Speculative Philosophy)

(1993) M.A. Philosophy, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN

(1996) Ph.D. Philosophy, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN

Dissertation: "Difference and Sense: Between Levinas and Husserl"

Readers: Robert Bernasconi (Chair), Tina Chanter, Thomas Nenon, Terrence Horgan

Courses
SPRING 2011

Critical Debates in Black Studies : In this course students will focus closely on major debates that have animated the field of Black Studies, addressing a wide range of issues from the slave trade to the present. Each week will focus on specific questions such as: What came first, racism or slavery? Is African art primitive? Did Europe underdevelop Africa? Is there Caribbean History or just history in the Caribbean? Should Black Studies exist? Is there a black American culture? Is Affirmative Action necessary? Was the Civil Rights Movement a product of government action or grass roots pressure? Is the underclass problem a matter of structure or agency? The opposing viewpoints around such questions will provide the main focus of the reading assignments, which will average two or three articles per week. In the first four weeks, students will learn a methodology for analyzing, contextualizing, and making arguments that they will apply in developing their own positions in the specific controversies that will make up the rest of the course. (Amherst College)

Theorizing the Black Atlantic : What happens to culture in the transition between Africa, Europe, and the Americas? What new forms of subjectivity, community, and culture emerge in the Americas? How do these new forms help us clarify the specifically African sense of "diaspora"? How does the experience of "the black Atlantic" alter our understanding of history and the development of ideas? In addressing these questions, this course examines themes of hybridity, double-consciousness, Modernity, and diaspora in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. Our attention will center on the work of Paul Gilroy, whose reflections on black Atlantic cultural formations have broken new theoretical ground over the past two decades. Gilroy's work will allow us to engage theoretically with the peculiar historical dynamics of the black Atlantic, which, in turn, enables us to attend at some depth to this particular diasporic consciousness through characterizations of literature, art, philosophy, and music. Alongside Gilroy, we will read other core theoretical texts on the black Atlantic by DuBois, Césaire, Fanon, Wright, Baldwin, and others. In order to establish context and some points of contrast, we will also read important texts on the philosophy of history and history of ideas by Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Bhabha. These varied reflections on the black Atlantic and the dynamics of cultural development help us understand the distinctive character of the African diaspora and its hybrid intellectual productions. (Amherst College)

FALL 2010

Critical Debates in Black Studies : In this course students will focus closely on major debates that have animated the field of Black Studies, addressing a wide range of issues from the slave trade to the present. Each week will focus on specific questions such as: What came first, racism or slavery? Is African art primitive? Did Europe underdevelop Africa? Is there Caribbean History or just history in the Caribbean? Should Black Studies exist? Is there a black American culture? Is Affirmative Action necessary? Was the Civil Rights Movement a product of government action or grass roots pressure? Is the underclass problem a matter of structure or agency? The opposing viewpoints around such questions will provide the main focus of the reading assignments, which will average two or three articles per week. In the first four weeks, students will learn a methodology for analyzing, contextualizing, and making arguments that they will apply in developing their own positions in the specific controversies that will make up the rest of the course. (Amherst College)

Black Existentialism : During the middle decades of the twentieth century, existentialism dominated the European philosophical and literary scene. Prominent theorists such as J-P Sartre, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty put the experience of history, alienation, and the body at the center of philosophical and literary life. It should be no surprise, then, that existentialism appealed to so many Afro-Caribbean and African-American thinkers of the same period and after. This course examines the critical transformation of European existentialist ideas through close readings of black existentialists Aime Césaire, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, and Wilson Harris, paired with key essays from Sartre, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty. As well, we will engage black existentialism not just as a series of claims, but also a method, which allows us to read works by African-American writers such as W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison in an existentialist frame. Lastly, we will consider the matter of how and why existentialism continues to function so centrally in contemporary Africana philosophy. (Amherst College)

SPRING TERM 2010

Fanon and After : This course functions as a critical introduction to post-WWII Caribbean philosophy and cultural theory. Our focus will be the work of Frantz Fanon and his engagement with a cluster of European intellectual trends: marxism, existentialism, and psychoanalysis. We will be guided by a simple pair of questions. What is the fate of European ideas when evaluated in and transformed by the experience of the Americas? And how does that transformation illuminate something crucial about the meaning of existence and collectivity after colonialism? Fanon's contribution to this discussion is profound, underscoring the uniqueness and fundamental newness of the Caribbean situation. But this contribution is not without intellectual dispute and debate. Following our reading of Fanon, then, we will examine this dispute and debate through close readings of Aimé Césaire, René Ménil, Derek Walcott, Édouard Glissant, and Patrick Chamoiseau. In these thinkers and their critical assessment of Fanon, we find sustained reflection on the meaning of West Indian postcolonial life in the experience of race, language, history, and community. Such reflections make for compelling and unprecedented interventions in existentialism, modernism, and postmodernism.

The Afro-Postmodern : This course examines the meaning of "the postmodern" in contemporary Caribbean and African-American philosophy, cultural theory, and the arts. What is the postmodern? And how does the experience of the Americas transform the meaning of postmodernity? Four basic concepts guide our inquiry: fragmentation, nomad, rhizome, and creoleness. Short readings from European theorists will provide the backdrop for our treatment of how the experiences of the Middle Passage, colonialism, and postcolony life fundamentally transform postmodern ideas. In tracking this transformation, our readings and reflections will explore the possible meanings of the Afro-postmodern in the works of Édouard Glissant, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Wilson Harris, and Patrick Chamoiseau. As well, with such theoretical considerations in place, we will examine the specifically Afro-postmodern significance of aesthetic practices in dub, sampling, graffiti, and anti-racist irony. Lastly, we will consider how Afro-postmodern conceptions of mixture, counter-narrative, and syncretism offer an alternative to dominant accounts of modernity and globalization. (at Amherst College)

FALL TERM 2009

Messianic Critique : 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. WRI : REA : PRS

Debates in Black Studies : In this course students will focus closely on major debates that have animated the field of Black Studies, addressing a wide range of issues from the slave trade to the present. Each week will focus on specific questions such as: What came first, racism or slavery? Is African art primitive? Did Europe underdevelop Africa? Is there Caribbean History or just history in the Caribbean? Should Black Studies exist? Is there a black American culture? Is Affirmative Action necessary? Was the Civil Rights Movement a product of government action or grass roots pressure? Is the underclass problem a matter of structure or agency? The opposing viewpoints around such questions will provide the main focus of the reading assignments, which will average two or three articles per week. In the first four weeks, students will learn a methodology for analyzing, contextualizing, and making arguments that they will apply in developing their own positions in the specific controversies that will make up the rest of the course. (at Amherst College)

SPRING TERM 2009

Signs of the Unrepresentable : In the broadest terms, this course is concerned with the intersection of theories of signification with an ethics of representation. In particular, this course examines the plausibility of the concept of "the unrepresentable" and the ethical questions it might raise. The idea of the unrepresentable takes on particular urgency when intellectuals and artists begin coming to terms with the astonishing and often genocidal violence of the long twentieth century. Is it possible to put catastrophic violence into language and image, or does that effort in fact repeat one and the same violence? Is "representation of the unrepresentable" a contradiction or an imperative? To investigate these questions and many companion issues, we will read theoretical works by Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and Levinas alongside poetry by Celan, Sachs, Glissant and others. At the center of our conversations will be a viewing and close reading of Claude Lanzmann's exercise in the unrepresentable - the tour-de-force documentary film Shoah. From these readings, viewings, and conversations, we will come to terms with the ethical question lying at the heart of any work of representation: what does it mean to speak for another? And how is that speaking ever responsible?

Black Existentialism : During the middle decades of the twentieth century, existentialism dominated the European philosophical and literary scene. Prominent theorists such as J-P Sartre, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty put the experience of history, alienation, and the body at the center of philosophical and literary life. It should be no surprise, then, that existentialism appealed to so many Afro-Caribbean and African-American thinkers of the same period and after. This course examines the critical transformation of European existentialist ideas through close readings of black existentialists Aime Césaire, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, and Wilson Harris, paired with key essays from Sartre, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty. As well, we will engage black existentialism not just as a series of claims, but also a method, which allows us to read works by African-American writers such as W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison in an existentialist frame. Lastly, we will consider the matter of how and why existentialism continues to function so centrally in contemporary Africana philosophy. (at Amherst College)

JANUARY TERM 2009

The Critical Essay : This course offers close reading and discussion of ten critical theory essays by authors from the 19th and 20th century. Figures to be discussed: Kant, Nietzsche, Gramsci, Heidegger, Althusser, Bhabha, Derrida, Foucault, Spivak, and Walcott. These essays address theoretical issues of reason, history, humanism, hegemony, identity, nationalism - all of which are central to contemporary literary, cultural, and political theory. The aim of our course will be to come to terms with the vocabulary of these various thinkers, as well as to engage the foundations of contemporary critical theory.

FALL TERM 2008

From Descartes to Kant : What is "modern" philosophy and how did it alter the course of Western thinking about the mind, body, perception, thinking, and therefore what we mean by knowledge? This course examines the birth and development of the moderns. We will begin the course with a brief, yet crucial, consideration of the world-changing discoveries of Galileo and Bacon, thinkers who uprooted two millennia of philosophical insight with a certain employment of the intellect. This "certain employment" gives birth to the conditions of so much of what we know as science and culture. In philosophy, this new conception of the intellect frames a conflict between two dominant schools: rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza) and empiricism (Locke, Berkeley, Hume). Our first course readings will draw primarily from Rene Descartes and David Hume in order to establish the wide, conflicting boundaries of this new philosophical orientation. In response to this conflict between Descartes and Hume, we will consider Immanuel Kant's critical turn in philosophy. Kant's work attempts to reconcile the potent insights of rationalism and empiricism, while at the same time ridding them of naivete. Close reading of difficult texts and expository writing will be the focus of our intellectual labor.

Debates in Black Studies : In this course students will focus closely on major debates that have animated the field of Black Studies, addressing a wide range of issues from the slave trade to the present. Each week will focus on specific questions such as: What came first, racism or slavery? Is African art primitive? Did Europe underdevelop Africa? Is there Caribbean History or just history in the Caribbean? Should Black Studies exist? Is there a black American culture? Is Affirmative Action necessary? Was the Civil Rights Movement a product of government action or grass roots pressure? Is the underclass problem a matter of structure or agency? The opposing viewpoints around such questions will provide the main focus of the reading assignments, which will average two or three articles per week. In the first four weeks, students will learn a methodology for analyzing, contextualizing, and making arguments that they will apply in developing their own positions in the specific controversies that will make up the rest of the course. (at Amherst College)

SPRING TERM 2008

Introducing the Frankfurt School

Introduction to Philosophy: The Problem of Embodiment

FALL TERM 2007

Between Husserl and Heidegger

On Derrida's Politics

SPRING TERM 2007

Between Levinas and Derrida

Latin American Political Philosophy 

FALL TERM 2006

Truth, Reconciliation, and Politics

Death (a tutorial, in the sense of a first year course, not a manual, though it was a bit of that in the highly theoretical sense of manual, that is, if you understand manuals to be comprised of metaphysical meditations and epistemological enigmas)

SPRING TERM 2006 Questioning the Self

FALL TERM 2005

Embodiment and Difference

Students I Advise
Current Division III

Chair :: Julia Metzger-Traber, Desirée Ramacus-Bushnel, Adrian Gordon

Member :: Marisa Pushee, Amy Lemay, David Cohn

Current Division II

Chair :: Calder Glazebrook, Cyrée Johnson, Jay Cassano, Jessica Wu, Jon Kearns, Kevin Roberts, Rose Mackey, Trinity Weiss, Justin DiCosola

Member :: Ben Daly, Jean Dupenloup, Ben Oginz, Laura Ealy, Sarah Marshall, Rachel Whitmore-Bard

Past Division III

Chair :: Alex Cookman, Aryenish Birdie, Seth Freakin' Wessler, Jay Rosenberg, Aminah Hasan, Kira Matica, David Tomlinson, Anderson Mackenzie, Dustin Cloues, Jonathan Ziemba, Gina Levitan

Member :: John Ward, Quanita Toffie, Caitlin Fraser-Reckard, Lenia Constantinou, Randy Jones, Kelly Karpinski, Ariana Rouda, Nina Stewart, Benjamin Schnare, Reid Kotlas

Past Division II

Chair :: Julia Metzger-Traber, Kira Matica, Anderson Mackenzie, Anna Elliott, Adrian Gordon

Member :: Caitlin Fraser-Reckard, Ben Hueftle, Reid Kotlas, Melanie Parker, Ariana Rouda, Romina Ruiz, Mannix Shinn, Katelin Wilton, Jonathan Ziemba, Annie Nichols

Past Division I

Luke Taylor, Jon Kearns, Laura Ealy, Peter Olson, Andrea Gagne, Rachel Weiss, Tara McLaughlin, Trinity Weiss, Alyssa Pilkons, Rebecca Rhodes, and a bunch of people who bolted after year's end.

Research
In college, I studied philosophy, theology, literature, history, and art in a Great Books Program at Seattle University, modeled on the program at St. John's College. Seattle University, because it is a Jesuit institution, added the theology component to the curriculum. This gave me an exceptionally strong background in the history of Western philosophy, as well as a sense of how philosophy emerged with companion discourses in the human arts.

Graduate study at University of Memphis was similarly committed to the history of Western philosophy, with particular interest (in my coursework) in Kant and Hegel. I also studied a good bit of Anglo-American philosophy, with special emphasis on Frege, Davidson, Kripke, and Quine. I wrote my favorite (and surely strongest) comprehensive examination on the relationship between Quine and Derrida with regard to problems of sign, meaning, and reference. That said, my primary focus in graduate school was contemporary European philosophy. Habit calls it "Continental philosophy," though I'm trying to ween myself off of that habit. Europe is in fact not a continent. Let's call it what it is: Europe, narrowly defined (in my case) as German and French philosophy.

My publications in and out of graduate school were - and still largely are - in European philosophy. I have particular interest in the problem of difference, both in the context of aesthetic theory and political philosophy.

This interest in the problem of difference prompted me to rethink and reinvent myself as an intellectual in 2000. I attended The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University that summer and studied historiography, literary theory, and politics with Peter Novick, David Carroll, Etienne Balibar, Suzanne Gearheart, and, with considerable influence, the poet Allen Grossman (with exceptional visitation by poet Susan Howe). From this summer of study, I developed a literacy in the problem of difference in the Americas, especially Latin America and the Caribbean. My study of Édouard Glissant with David Carroll, and of Derek Walcott in conversation with Allen Grossman, changed my intellectual sensibilities. Since that summer, my primary research and reading has been directed toward Caribbean theorists/writers Glissant, Wilson Harris, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Cesaire, George Lamming, and Kamau Brathwaite, as well as Latin American theorists/writers Gustavo Gutierrez, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, and of course the always amazing Subcommandante Marcos.

My overarching concern is straighforward: how do we respond to loss, in particular when that loss leaves us unable to connect to language? Or, another way: how do we speak about the unspeakable? The publication of Godard Between Identity and Difference marked my attempt to think about such questions through Godard's films in the 1970s, films in which Godard thinks through the enigma and violence of "speaking for the Other." My current work on Glissant and a certain postcolonial Levinas attends to these very same issues. Perhaps, in the end, I'm only rehearsing Spivak's most famous question: can the subaltern speak?

Current Projects
For a full précis of my book-length projects, as well as essays in-progress, please see the "Research" and "In Progress" tabs at my professional website:

http://www.jdrabinski.com

Enjoy!

Community Involvement
Considerable Financial Contributor to coffee culture in Amherst

Occasional talks at Amherst Cinema

Semi-Official Contributor To Ambience at Amherst Coffee

Additional Information
My son is the best boy in the world.

My spouse is frankly way out of my league

I love television, even though I think I'm not supposed to love it.

I don't know why my officemate thinks its ok to eat my snacks.

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