Course of Study

This course traces the Kant/Hegel divide into German Idealism and Romanticism, and then from Marx into Nietzsche and Freud. From here we turn to Heidegger’s ontological critique of Western thought, especially as he intensifies Nietzsche’s phenomenological deconstruction of Platonic truth and proposes art as the clearing in which truth appears. This proposition “slips” into French itineraries, such as Luce Irigaray’s feminist reorientation of psychoanalytic theory and Jacques Derrida’s project of deconstruction. Then, in response to Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that “all the great philosophical ideas of the last century…had their beginnings in Hegel,” we trace Hegel’s ideas through 20th-century French post-humanists, ultimately arriving at Lyotard and Foucault.

The IDSVA Independent Study program is designed to help students develop particular scholarly interests and to integrate those interests within the IDSVA curriculum. It is also meant to encourage exploration and extended research toward a dissertation topic; and to broaden the scope of the core curriculum by applying the methodologies acquired in the seminars to issues that are germane to each student’s field of interest. Possible independent study topics are explored within the context of seminar readings and in light of guest lectures and museum visits, and discussed with IDSVA academic advisors. Examples include a research paper on psychoanalytic critique and Latin American cinema; maternal aesthetics and representation of otherness in art; phenomenology and Afro-Futurism; a comparison between Buddhist philosophy and Twentieth-century continental philosophy; as well as studies in the fields of craft, sexuality, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, identity, etc.

This course is comprised of a six-day intensive residency in Madrid, Marrakech, or Mexico City (alternating years). Besides attending seminars and lectures, students give seminar presentations on their fall Independent Studies (802), conceived as formal conference-style papers meant to prepare students to be effective speakers and presenters in professional academic environments. Museum, gallery, artist studio visits, and guided tours offered by curators and museum educators supplement the weekly activities. Museum visits in Madrid include the Prado, the Reina Sofia, the Caixa Forum, and a day trip to the ancient town of Toledo, a historical example of multi-cultural coexistence through its medieval Arab, Jewish, and Christian monuments. In Marrakech, students visit the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden, the Medersa Ben Yousef, the Museé Yves Saint Laurent and Jardin Majorelle, the Berber Museum, the Palais el Badii, the Montresso Foundation, and Le Jardin Secret. In Mexico City, students visit the Anthropology Museum, the Frida Kahlo House, the ancient site of Teotihuacán, the Templo Mayor, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.

Toward an Ethico-Aesthetics will re-ask the questions: “what is art?” and “what is art’s responsibility?” This conceptual move will allow us to consider the philosophical relation of ethics to aesthetics and vice versa as implicit in the term “representation.” This in turn becomes the signal ethico-aesthetic question in the work of Fanon, Arendt, Nietzsche, Nancy, Deleuze, Sloterdijk, Junger, Berardi, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lotringer, Heidegger, and Agamben. The course is divided into four themes of inquiry: “Liberation,” “Metaphors of the End,” “Ends of Man,” and “Art & Politics.” Final outcomes include two exam papers based on the readings.

Following the Independent Study seminar in the fall, this course further develops each student’s research, consisting of a long paper on a topic of their choice. Students complete their IS by working one-on-one with an Independent Study director — a faculty member whose scholarship may be particularly suitable to a proposed project. Independent Study papers must be of publishable level; students are asked to submit their papers to academic conferences or peer-reviewed journals for publication. Often times Independent Studies provide the groundwork for the dissertation proposal to be developed in the Third Year.

In this intensive residency seminar students reengage Kant & Hegel with a reading of Kant’s Third Critique, a good close reading of Hegel’s Preface, Introduction, and Chapter IV to the Phenomenology of Mind, readings from Hegel’s Aesthetics, Vol. I, and texts by Heidegger, Heraclitus, Plato, and Nietzsche. Consistent with the Topological Studies approach, students engage with these texts while immersing themselves in the art and architecture of cities like Berlin (Late Neoclassical/Early Industrial paradigm), Paris (Bourgeois/Modernist), Venice (Baroque/Global commerce) and Athens (East/West Transhistorical). Other readings reflect the contributions of Visiting Faculty, such as Howard Caygill (Kafka: In Light of the Accident), Santiago Zabala (Why Only Art can Save Us), and Jean-Luc Nancy (The Sense of the World), among others.

The pre-dissertation seminar takes place in the summer as students enter their third year. In the online seminar, core faculty lead discussions about the unfolding tensions and overlaps between formalism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics, in relation to theories of knowledge, subjectivity, form, and the way ‘meaning’ happens in the work of art. The pre-dissertation seminar also introduces a discussion on methodologies and approaches to thinking, looking at, and writing about art. These studies together prepare the ground for a more extended discussion on methodologies in the fall semester.

This seminar continues the conversation that started in the summer. This seminar’s goal is twofold: on the one hand, it is intended to help students develop a comprehensive, in-depth understanding of the conceptual and methodological debates that have defined contemporary aesthetic theory (formalism, phenomenology, hermeneutics; Marxist, psychoanalytic and feminist theory; postcolonial critique; structuralism, post-structuralism and post-modernism). On the other hand, it aims to help students start the process of developing their independent researches into a roadmap for the dissertation, to be completed by the end of the spring semester next year in the form of a ‘Written Exam’ and corollary documents to be presented at the Qualifying Exams.

The Artist-Philosopher: Aeschylus to Kristeva, situates the artist-philosopher as a figure who transgresses the boundaries between art and philosophy that were originally established by Western Metaphysics. Sometimes this figure finds itself at the heart of the central philosophical issues; at other times it rises in the poetic and artistic gestures that swirl around these central issues. In this course, then, we look at main concepts in Western philosophy through the lens of the artist-philosopher, so as to renew, or even undo, their trajectory. As we travel through the chronology of philosophical thought, we will ask, what might constitute New Philosophy? And what tools does the artist-philosopher have at its disposal, and which ones does she have to envision herself?

This Dissertation Seminar addresses how to plan for a long-term research project (the 80k-100K word dissertation), helping students to create reasonable deadlines, conduct efficient research, and balance the simultaneous advancement of writing and scholarship. Over this semester, students complete an introduction or first chapter of their dissertation projects started in the Fall semester. An annotated bibliography is also completed in this semester, in preparation for the Qualifying Oral Examination (scheduled in the summer). During one-on-one calls and conference calls faculty and students discuss techniques for efficient and sustainable research, and offer feedback on each student’s chapter-in-progress, focusing in particular on the development of an argument supported by adequate evidence grounded in existing scholarship and theoretical underpinning.

This seminar expands the philosophical journey into a wider realm of thought, where a philosophical figure turns into a philosophical climate, where art turns into poetics and essences into ecosystems. Texts that provided us with foundations for thinking now connect us to an entire ecosystem of being where conceptual, environmental, decolonial, and futural concerns are envisioned. Artist-philosopher here stands on a geo-ontological ground where continental glissement includes not only two European countries dominating one continent, but all continents that exert their visible and invisible influence on thought that is yet to come – including the ‘archipelago’ as a new spatial paradigm.

The Qualifying Examination includes two components, a Written and an Oral. The Written Exam must be completed prior to sitting for the Oral examination, and it consists of the paper and attending documents written in the Dissertation Preparation seminars I and II. Students take their Oral Exams in the summer at the end of their Third Year; after passing the Qualifying Exams, they obtain Permission to Proceed with the dissertation.

PhD candidates enroll in Dissertation Preparation at the start of their dissertation project, after passing the Qualifying Exams, and for each following fall and spring semesters until the completion of the dissertation. The main goal of the Dissertation Preparation course is to guide the process of writing the dissertation, and to help the PhD candidate produce a document that fulfills the following criteria: 1) To form a distinct contribution to the knowledge of the subject and afford evidence of originality by the discovery of new facts and/or by the exercise of independent critical power, interpretation, and argumentation; 2) To give a critical assessment of the relevant literature, and in so doing, 3) To demonstrate a deep and synoptic understanding of the field of study, objectivity, and the capacity for judgment in complex situations and autonomous work in that field.