Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction and Other Open Secrets

Catalog description

What does it mean to live in a time shaped by secrecy, dissimulation, and spectral identities? This seminar examines the open secret of modern critical theory, namely the relationship between Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, and the “Other” within European Philosophy with the figural Jew. Long attacked as a “Jewish science” and dismissed as “crypto-mysticism,” both psychoanalysis and deconstruction have been haunted by suspicions of Jewishness, Kabbalah, or the trace of a radical particularism that shuns the universal. These suspicions reveal how Jewishness has become a kind of excess in European intellectual history: a ghost, an open secret, a persistent specter. This course explores the works of Freud and Derrida, among others, by tracing the figure of the Marrano, the Crypto-Jew, Sabbatian, the German–Jew, and the Arab–Jew, as figures whose lives depended on secrecy, double belonging, or esotericism.