090052 UE The Objects of Thinking: Literature, Philosophy, Materiality (2021W)

This course will seek to provide a historical and philosophical genealogy of contemporary debates over the word and concept of “materiality.” As a philosophical term linked especially with the era of the Enlightenment, materialism usually deploys reductive and mechanistic causal explanations of spiritual phenomena on the basis of matter alone, a signature trait which is again legible in the context of today’s biological conceptions of the subject. However, a genealogy of the concept of matter can be reconstructed which challenges this understanding and highlights closer links between matter and ideas. The question we will try to answer through readings of writers and philosophers who repeatedly evoke and reference objects in order to make their arguments is the following: “Why is it that philosophy cannot proceed without its objects and what does this persistence say not only about the role and place of objects within thinking but also about the materiality of thought itself?” The course is organized around specific objects that appear in the philosophies of the writers we read, and the course will unearth connecting threads among the semester’s readings. For example, between Lucretius’s matter formed by atoms and Bergson’s “aggregate of images,” between Christianity’s Eucharistic ritual, and Proust’s repetition of this ritual in his famous madeleine episode, between the spectral materialities we encounter in Hegel, Marx and Freud, between Hegel’s “substance as subject” and Adrian Johnston’s “transcendental materialism,” and between psychoanalysis and recent developments on materialism by Žižek and Dolar. Finally, the course will explore how this debate can shed light on the place of the material world/objects in the cultural politics of Modern Greek literature: from Romanticism to modernism to post-war literature, matter – be it nature, statues, or, simply, a box – asks us to think about the entire network of national, social, and political relations that is sealed within it (Dionysios Solomos, Constantine Cavafy, Giorgos Seferis, Aris Alexandrou) are authors we will discuss).