PhD Seminar organized by Marina Lathouri and Will Orr | Term 1
This PhD seminar series introduces four key problematics from the philosophy of history and the theory of historiography. A question not simply of the “past” but of the present and the future, by asking “what is historical?” we hope to open a discussion on the critical and eminently practical relevance of history for contemporary action—whether in the critical polemic, historical research, or design project.
Each session performs a close reading of paired texts, a specific body of historical writing, to establish a conceptual foundation for thinking about history, how history is being produced, what is written, what is said and how it can be taught.
The seminar also looks ahead to a series of debates and discussions with visiting speakers taking place in Term 2 on the related question: “What is Contemporary?”
Seminar I History and Modernity
Nov 15 | 4pm – 6pm
Immanuel Kant: “An answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784)
Michel Foucault: “What is Enlightenment?”
In: The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, pp.32-50, 1984
Supplementary readings:
Peter Osborne, Chapter 1: “Modernity, a Different Time” in The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (1995), pp.1-29
Seminar II History as Agency
Nov 22 | 4pm – 6pm
W. F. Hegel: Introduction to the Lectures of the Philosophy of History (1837)
Karl Marx: “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845)
Supplementary readings:
Theodore W. Adorno, Lectures 3 and 4 in An Introduction to Dialectics (1958), pp.15-36
Michael Löwy, “A Historical Materialism with Romantic Splinters: Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx” in Jernej Habjan and Jessica Whyte eds., (Mis)readings of Marx in Continental Philosophy (2014), pp.19-33
Seminar III History as Theory
Nov 29 | 4pm – 6pm
Manfredo Tafuri: Introduction to Theories and History (1968)
Reinhardt Koselleck: “On the Need for Theory in the Discipline of History”
In: The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, pp.1-19, 2002
Supplementary readings:
Judith Butler, “Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity” in Katrin de Boer and Ruth Sonderegger eds., Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy (2012), pp.10-29
Tomas Llorens, “On Making History” in Joan Ockamn, Deborah Berke, and Mary Mcleod eds., Architecture Criticism Ideology (1985), pp.24-8
Seminar IV History and the Contemporary
Dec 6 | 4pm – 6pm
Giorgio Agamben: “What is the Contemporary?” (2008)
Friedrich Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations (1876)
Supplementary readings:
Terry Smith, “Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question,” in Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee eds., Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (2008)
Jean-Luc Nancy, “Art Today,” lecture Academia di Brera, Milan, 2006. In: Journal of Visual Culture, vol.9, no.1 (April 2010), pp.91-9