Senior Seminar

We will consider philosophical texts that require fictional writing in order to establish their “argument” and fictional texts that make non-argumentative interventions into philosophical matters. We will also consider how and why  such genre distinctions sometimes break down. In particular, we will focus on efforts to give an account of oneself, of language that make use of a fictional past to forge a different future and, in the process, encounter some constitutive difficulties.  We will begin with Rousseau’s Confessions and the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals,  Kafka’s parables, and conclude with a reading of Sarah Kofman’s fiction and philosophy: Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Smothered Words, and selections from her Nietzsche and Metaphor, and Freud and Fiction.