Troubled Origins: Accounting for Oneself (Nietzsche to Eribon)

Catalog description

What does it mean to account for one’s life by accounting for one’s origins? Nietzsche, for one, expressed the “uniqueness” of his existence “in the form of a riddle”: “As my father I have already died, as my mother I still live and grow old.” We will study literary and philosophical attempts at catching up with one’s troubled origins, including Nietzsche’s _Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is_ (self-interpretation); Freud’s “Selbstdarstellung” (self-portraiture); Kafka’s "Letter to Father" (paternal confessions); Derrida’s _Monolingualism of the Other_ (native languages and lost origins); Eribon’s _Returning to Reims_ (“class closet”). Undergraduates from diverse fields welcome.