Topics in Cultural Analysis & German Thought

Catalog description

This seminar explores the philosophical and psychic dimensions of negativity as the force that shapes both thought and life. Beginning with Hegel’s dialectical notion of negation as the motor of becoming, we will trace how this concept transforms in Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and in Bergson’s philosophy of duration and creative evolution. The course examines how negativity moves from logical contradiction to psychic repression to temporal differentiation — from the structure of Spirit to the work of mourning to the élan vital. We will ask whether negativity is destructive or productive, reactive or generative, and whether contemporary thought can still think transformation without the negative. By reading Phenomenology of Spirit (selected sections), Freud’s “Negation” and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and Bergson’s Creative Evolution, we will test the hypothesis that the unconscious is not merely the site of repression, but a plastic power of differentiation, where negation becomes the very form of life.