The priority of the other

Emmanuel Levinas                 

Film:  "Night and Fog",Alain Resnais (France, 1955, 30 min.) (shown in class)

PART II:  WRITING WITHOUT POWER  (approx. 10 classes)

Writing without power                                   

Sarah Kofman

Film:  "The Long Way Home," Moriah Productions (USA, 1997, 120 min.) (excerpt shown in class)
Film:   "Eye of Vichy," Claude Chabrol (France, 1993, 110 min.) (shown in class)

Mad forgiveness

Vladimir Jankelevitch                                  

PART III:  HUMANITY AS WHAT SURVIVES HUMANITY  (approx. 5 classes)

Primo Levi

Giorgio Agamben

Film:  "The Grey Zone" (USA, 2002, 108 min.)

PART IV:  CRITIQUE OF THE PURE  (approx. 6 classes)

Film:  “Jacques Derrida,” Wall to Wall Television Productions (England, 1992, 39 min.) (shown in class)

Jacques Derrida
Film:  "Kedma," Amos Gitai (Israel/France, 2002, 100 min.)

PART V:  CONTINUITIES  (approx. 8 classes)

Tim Madigan
    The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

Film: “The Birth of a Nation,” D.W. Griffith (USA, 1915, 187 min.) (excerpt shown in class)

Film:  “The Uprising of 34,” George Stoney, Judith Helfand, and Susanne Rostock (USA, 1995, 87 min.) (shown in class)

Lisa Duggan

Continuities with the present

CONCLUSION  (1 class)


COURSE TOPICS:  some views of ethics since and in response to the Nazi death camps (subtopics: post-secularism, multiculturalism, colonialism, globalization, postmodernism)

COURSE GOAL:  increased understanding of course topics

COURSE TEXTS: 
Zvi Kolitz, Yosl Rakover Talks to God (Pantheon) (includes “Loving the Torah More than God,” and “A Privation of Providence”)
“Interview with François Poirier” (from Is It Righteous to Be?  Interviews with Emmanuel Lévinas, Stanford) (handout)
Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity:  An Essay on Exteriority (Duquesne)

Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (Bison Books)
-------- Smothered Words (Northwestern)
Vladimir Jankelevitch, Forgiveness (Chicago)

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (Simon & Schuster)
-------- The Drowned and the Saved (Vintage)
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz:  The Witness and the Archive (Zone Books)

Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin (Stanford)
“The Deconstruction of Actuality,” “Pardon me for taking you at your word” (handouts)

Tim Madigan, The Burning:  Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Houghton Mifflin)
Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers (Duke)

FILMS:  The films treat or exemplify course themes .  Some assignments will refer to the films.  Films not marked “shown in class” will be viewed by students outside of class.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
Readings as assigned
Participation in class discussions
Class attendance
Five take-home assignments  take-home #1 take-home #2
Two papers (around eight pages)  paper #1  paper #2

DIVERSITY COURSE REQUIREMENTS:  This course meets the requirements for a Core Curriculum Diversity course.  It focuses on excluded groups within western cultures, it has rigorous writings requirements and it is on the 200-level or above.

ATTENDANCE:  Much of the important work in this course goes on in class.  Students are expected to be in attendance except in cases of illness, emergency or religious holiday, to be in attendance for the whole class session and not to make appointments that conflict with class sessions.

Attendance is required and will be taken at the beginning of each class session.  Students may miss three classes without penalty.  Five points will be subtracted from the final grade for the fourth class missed and two points for each class missed after that.  Exceptions will be made in the case of illness, emergency or religious holiday.  A written excuse must be provided for exceptions to be made.

TAKE-HOME ASSIGNMENTS:  There will be five take-home essays.  They will help students focus their reading and prepare to write the course papers.

PAPERS:  The papers will be essays (not research papers) on topics pertaining to the course texts and films.  They will be around eight pages long.

You need use no books other than the course texts in order to write the papers.  In an essay, you state a thesis, explain it and argue for it.  The basic structure of an essay is:  an introduction in which you state your thesis, the body of the essay in which you explain and argue for your thesis, the conclusion in which you summarize or highlight what you have done in the essay.

Essays will be typed or word processed, double-spaced, in 10- or 12-point type.  They will be five or six pages long.  They will have a title and a title page.  They will be in finished form and without errors in grammar, spelling and punctuation.  All quotations will be accompanied by a reference in parentheses.  Long quotations will be indented. 

Essays will be evaluated on the following basis:

1.  Do you have the parts mentioned above (introduction, body, conclusion)?
2.  Do you fulfill the functions mentioned above (state thesis, explain it, argue for it, summarize or highlight)?
3.  Is the thesis you are writing about an interesting and important one?
4.  Does your explanation of the thesis show that it is an interesting and important one?  Does your explanation make the basic concepts and terms in your essay clear to the reader?
5.  Are your arguments clear and convincing to the reader?
6.  Do you use specific examples from the text you are writing about to make your arguments stronger?  Do you use direct quotations from the text you are writing about to make your arguments stronger?
7.  Does your conclusion add something to the essay as a whole?
8.  Is the essay typed or word processed (double-spaced)?  Does it include a title and a title page?  Is it in finished form and without errors in grammar, spelling and punctuation?  Are all quotations accompanied by a reference in parentheses?

REFERENCES:  Quotations in the text should end with quotation marks followed by a reference in parentheses followed by a
period (references to classical texts will be explained in class).  For example (a quotation from Levinas’s interview with François Poirier):

“My whole effort consists in thinking sociality not as a dispersion but as an exit from the solitude one takes sometimes for sovereignty, in which man is ‘master of himself as he is of the universe’, in which domination is experienced as the supreme perfection of the human” (57-58).

EVALUATION:
Grades will be based on the papers and take-home assignments, weighted equally (1/2 each).

Late papers or take-homes will lose a letter grade for each class session they are late.  There will be no extra credit work.  The student will be held responsible for knowing what goes on in class.  Absences will not excuse you from knowing due dates of take-homes and papers.

The grading scale is:  94-100, A; 90-93 A-; 87-89 B+; 84-86 B; 80-83 B-; 77-79 C+; 74-76 C; 70-73 C-; 67-69 D+; 64-66 D; 60-63 D-; below 60, F.

It is the instructor's policy that cheating, plagiarism or submission of written work for this course which was submitted in another course merits a course grade of 'F'.

GRADUATE STUDENTS:  This course is a 400-level undergraduate course offered also for graduate-level credit.  To receive graduate credit, graduate students will complete only three graded assignments, three papers around twelve pages each.  The papers will involve more extensive reading than undergraduate papers do.  Evaluation will be based on the three papers, weighted equally.  Graduate students will discuss their additional reading and their papers with the instructor prior to writing them and will take the initiative early in the semester to schedule a meeting with the instructor to do so.  All other requirements and procedures for graduate students are the same as those for undergraduate students. 

Graduate students will meet the same evaluation criteria as undergraduate students and some additional criteria, namely:  Do the papers evidently derive from additional reading?  Does the student’s writing reflect broad familiarity with philosophic concepts and modes of argumentation?  Does the student’s writing reflect some understanding of the history of philosophic treatment of the concepts discussed?  Is the student able to sustain multifaceted argument and analysis?

Graduate students will achieve deeper understanding of the course material as a result of their additional reading and of their discussions with the instructor.

USE OF THE INTERNET:  Use of the internet for research purposes is appropriate.  However, students should use their own ideas in their papers.  In addition, they should be aware that papers plagiarized from internet sources can easily be detected through the use of a search engine such as Google.

INTERNET RESOURCES:  This course outline on the internet will contains links relevant to this class.

COURSE LINKS:  The course outline and class assignments can be accessed through my homepage <www.unr.nevada.edu/~achten/homepage.html>.  They will also be distributed in class.  My homepage can also be accessed through the Department of Philosophy website <www.unr.edu/philosophy>  or a search engine such as Google  <www.google.com> (search for "Deborah Achtenberg" homepage).

CLASS FORMAT:  This class will be a combination of lecture and discussion.  The discussion generally will be guided discussion rather than general discussion or general debate.

Lectures and discussions will refer to course texts.  Students will need to bring the relevant course texts to class if they are to benefit from lectures and discussions.

STUDYING:  Many students will find that they do better in this course if they study together with other students.

DISABILITY POLICY:  The Department of Philosophy is committed to equal opportunity in education for all students, including those with documented physical or learning disabilities.  According to University policy, a student with a documented disability is required to contact his or her instructors during the first week of each semester to discuss accommodations appropriate to ensure equity in grading, classroom experiences and out-of-class assignments.  Each instructor will meet with the student and Student Services Center staff members to formulate a written plan for appropriate accommodations, if they are required.


My office hours are Monday, 10:00 a.m. - noon, and Wednesday, 10:00 - 11:00 a.m., or by appointment (Cain Hall 108D).  Please feel free to come by to discuss the course topics or your progress in the course.  I am happy to meet with you at some other time if it is more convenient.  If you wish to make an appointment to see me at another time, call 784-6742 (my office).  If you try to get in touch with me and cannot, leave a note with your phone number so that I can call you.

My e-mail address is:  <achten@unr.nevada.edu>.  I invite you to e-mail me.  Keep in mind that, due to time delays, e-mail can be an unsuccessful medium for making appointments or for taking care of other time-sensitive matters.  In addition, e-mail is an inappropriate medium for discussion of grades.  Finally, most advisement is best taken care of in person rather than by e-mail.