Politics and Ethics of Deconstruction: Reading the Late Derrid 3800-PEDD26-M-OG

The subject of this year's lecture series will be the ethical and political dimensions of deconstruction, which is often identified with a strategy of reading texts. While the critical aspect of Derrida's project, as inscribed in deconstruction, can be interpreted as having ethical and political consequences, it was only in his later writings and interviews that Derrida explicitly linked his project to specific ethical and political aims, and began to address issues connected to events of significant importance to the contemporary world. The aim of the course is to organize and present selected problems arising in the texts of the author of „Margins of Philosophy”, as well as to show how the late Derrida inspired representatives of currents closely related to deconstruction (such as radical hermeneutics), and to examine the relationship between his thought from the last decade and representatives of Italian philosophy (Agamben, Esposito).
The lecture series will be divided into several parts, devoted respectively to:
- ethical and religious issues: deconstruction as heterology, the concepts of the Other, obligation, law, and friendship
- political issues: the relationship between deconstruction and democracy, the idea of communism, justice, forgiveness, the death penalty, and the concept of sovereignty
- anthropological issues (more precisely, the boundary separating the human from the non-human), treated as a guiding thread of Derrida's final seminars, in which the aforementioned questions converge around the central problem of the boundary between the human and the animal, with the theme of death running throughout these seminars and binding them together.

Course coordinators

Urszula Zbrzeźniak

Type of course

general courses

Learning outcomes

Knowledge acquired:
- the student knows and understands detailed issues (substantive and methodological) and the most important new achievements within the chosen philosophical discipline
- the student knows and understands the role of philosophical reflection in shaping culture
- the student knows and understands specialized terminology in Polish
- the student knows and understands the main developmental trends in the humanities disciplines in which the education takes place

Skills acquired:
- the student is able to correctly apply the philosophical terminology learned
- the student is able to interpret a philosophical text, commenting on and confronting theses from various texts
- the student is able to creatively and innovatively apply philosophical and methodological knowledge in formulating hypotheses and constructing critical arguments
- the student is able to initiate debate

Social competences acquired:
- the student is ready to identify the knowledge and skills they possess
- the student is ready to recognize gaps in their knowledge and skills and to seek ways of addressing those gaps
- the student is ready to independently and critically evaluate achievements within a given humanities discipline

Assessment criteria

The condition for passing the course is attendance and writing a short term paper.

Additional information

Information on level of this course, year of study and semester when the course unit is delivered, types and amount of class hours - can be found in course structure diagrams of apropriate study programmes. This course is related to the following study programmes: