The purpose of the present course is to provide a toolbox to think about the present, about the deep crisis that western philosophy has experienced, after the Second World War. From one side, we will study the different approaches of philosophers that wished to "think", or to "un-think" the Holocaust, trying to create-erase philosophy from scratch: the philosophy of Michele Foucault and Gilles Deleuze will be at the center of this part, philosophers who found a new way of thinking the tradition of philosophy all together, inventing a new language and new horizons for thought, following the thinking of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.
From the other side, we will learn the more "traditional" philosophers, who tried to think through a kind of "reconciliation" with philosophy, to create a "detour" of the crisis, such as Immanuel Levinas and Jean Luc Marion, who continued the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, towards a new theological and ethical thinking.
This surprising "Theological turn of French Philosophy" will stand at the center of this part, seeing that this split within the French poststructuralist tradition, which reflex the dispute between the rationalism of Kant and the non-rationalism of Hegel, can be seen also at the near-by discourses: This tension which was very fruitful in nineteen century, continued to "work" within western modernism till now, and can be seen clearly in art. So, In order to understand it deeply, we will use some examples from art and poetry, classic, modern and postmodern too.