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PHIL
494/694 Ethics After Auschwitz Dr. Deborah Achtenberg |
Fall
2005 Mon., Wed., Fri. 1:00-1:50 p.m. |
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ETHICS
AFTER AUSCHWITZ
(A
Core Curriculum
Diversity Course)
In this course, we will consider some views of ethics since and in response to the Nazi death camps. We will read writings by French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas, Sarah Kofman, Vladimir Jankelevitch and Jacques Derrida and Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben; memoirs by Sarah Kofman and by Primo Levi of Italy; fiction by Zvi Kolitz, originally from Lithuania. We will also view films (and selections from films) from the U.S., France and Israel including “The Pianist” (Roman Polanski, France, 2002); “Night and Fog” (Alain Resnais, France, 1955), “Eye of Vichy” (Claude Chabrol, France, 1993), “The Grey Zone” (Tim Blake Nelson, USA, 2002), "The Long Way Home" (Moriah Productions, USA, 1997), “Kedma” (Amos Gitai, Israel, 2002). Course topics: God's hidden face (where was God during the shoah?); the priority of the other (other people, people who are other or different); writing without power (without categorizing, totalizing); humanity as what survives humanity (human beings as survivors and sufferers); the critique of the pure (of conceptions of pure racial, religious, national, linguistic, gender types); multiculturalism (monoculturalism vs. multiculturalism). We will also discuss: forgiveness; hospitality; moral ambiguity; human autonomy and its lack; political resistance; media constructions of political reality; continuities between issues of religion, race, class and gender. Some new topics will be considered in this year’s version of the course, including: political misuses of the holocaust/shoah; continuities between the holocaust/shoah and some historical events in the US including antiblack violence in Tulsa in 1921, antilabor violence in response to the cotton mill workers’ General Strike of 1934, and normalization of homosexuals evidenced in portrayals of the murder of a lesbian by her lover in Memphis in 1892. In relation to these issues, we will consider selections from the first Hollywood blockbuster, “The Birth of a Nation” (D.W. Griffith, USA, 1915), The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 by Tim Madigan, the documentary film “The Uprising of 34”about the '34 general strike (George Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne Rostock, USA, 1995), and Sapphic Slashers by Lisa Duggan. We will view selections from two films with contrasting views of the relation between the holocaust/shoah and the founding of the state of Israel, “The Long Way Home” and “Kedma.” Requirements: five take-home assignments, two papers. |