180093 SE Philosophical Fragments in Contemporary Philosophy (2017S)

In the wake of two world wars and the continuing fragmentation of everyday life, traditional philosophy's systematic, deductive and totalizing form came to seem increasingly unviable. For 20th century writers of the philosophical fragment, this situation called for a wholesale reevaluation of that form of philosophical writing whose conceptualization of relations between part and whole, form and content, individual and society, had been undermined by changes within a contemporary life that no longer corresponded to its concept. If the content of reality had been itself transformed, then neither the form nor the substance of philosophy could remain unchanged. Indeed, for the writers of the philosophical fragment, this situation required a transformation of philosophy’s very form. To capture the age in thought, philosophy sought to become the contemporary of an age that had itself been broken and fragmented: Walter Benjamin’s collage-based writing, Ernst Bloch’s experiments with Denkbilder, Theodor W. Adorno’s paratactic texts, E.M. Cioran’s attempt to empty philosophy from the inside out, Maurice Blanchot’s hermetic aphorisms—all attempts to register, within philosophical form, the historical change effected within philosophy’s content.

In its turn to the philosophical fragment, 20th century philosophy did not so much break with the whole of tradition as it continued and extended a tradition that had long problematized the dialectical interrelation of form and content. Like Schlegel, Hegel and Nietzsche before them, these 20th century writers of the philosophical fragment recognized that the content of philosophical truth could only articulate itself within a form that is the equal of truth’s contemporary mode of appearance. The writers of philosophical fragments studied here responded to this situation by refiguring traditional philosophical form and, in so doing, thereby radically refigured philosophy’s content.

The course seeks to better understand the development of the philosophical fragment by asking after a problem the fragment’s contemporary ubiquity could pose, but not solve: How is the fragment to be understood philosophically? Does the proliferation of its form imply a contemporaneous notion of the philosophical fragment? And how might the inner, conceptual consistency of the contemporary fragment differ from both the fragment’s philosophical history as well as the 20th and 21st century’s own self-understanding?

To address these questions, the course begins with a survey of contemporary efforts aimed at determining the fragment’s conceptual, political, art-historical and poetic import. We will then turn to what is arguably the most exacting treatment of the concept of the philosophical fragment, Friedrich Schlegel’s Critical Fragments (1797), Athenaeum Fragments (1798) and Ideas (1800), and read it alongside Rodolphe Gasché’s “Ideality and Fragmentation.”

Our sustained study of philosophical fragments will set out from Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia (1918) before turning to Benjamin’s One-Way Street (1928) and Bloch’s Traces (1930, revised in 1959). Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1944-45) and Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1944, revised in 1969) mark the historical rupture extended by E.M. Cioran’s A Short History of Decay (1949), All Gall is Divided (1952) and The Temptation to Exist (1956), and Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster (1980).

Interspersed with our reading of the above fragments, we will study several text’s essential to understanding modern philosophy’s attempt to think the necessary imbrication of form and content, including selections from Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Benjamin’s “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” to The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Blanchot’s “Literature and the Right to Death” and Adorno’s “The Essay as Form.”