Special Study

Professor Catherine Malabou will be in residence at the Townsend Center for the Humanities from April 2nd-23rd to offer a 1-unit, 4-week graduate seminar.

The leading question of this seminar will be: if we were to start our life anew, would we choose to live the same as the one we already lived, or would we opt for a totally new one? This question, inscribed at the heart of both Platonic and Nietzschean philosophies, opens to that of memory, repetition, erasure and change. It also addresses the ethical problem of self-improvement (would we like to be better?), as well as that of the absence of any possible transformation of the past (as in Orphic myths, Greek tragedies, and traumatic situations). This seminar will provide a philosophical approach to these issues, but will also invite different colleagues from other disciplines to contribute to the debate using literature, anthropology, film, etc. as archival supports to elaborate on the central questions.

French Philosopher Catherine Malabou teaches at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University in London. She is the author of The Future of Hegel (2005), What Should We Do with Our Brain? (2008), Plasticity at the Eve of Writing (2009) and Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (2013). Her work has created the foundation for a wide range of current research focusing on the intersections between neuro and biological science and the humanities.