GOVT 6785

Persecution and the Art of Writing

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2017-2018.

Our title derives from the political philosopher Leo Strauss, who provides our initial analytic, methodological, and theoretical model. We extend beyond Straussian ideological positions to include art unrestricted to written philosophy and literature, namely: painting, music, cinema, and Reason of State. Persecution (via censorship or heterodoxy) is understood as being both externally imposed and internalized. "The double rhetoric" or "esotericism," hence "writing between the lines," has its millennial history since archaic times. After discussing practices (from before Plato to Machiavelli, Spinoza, Bayle, Toland, Swift) we focus on recent techniques of "concealing messages" across disciplines, periods, places. Examples include Lessing (on Free Masons), Hegel (as read by Left-Hegelians and by Marx), Gramsci (Prison Notebooks); also Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, Wittgenstein, Carl Schmitt, Strauss, Dickinson, and their legacies.  

When Offered Fall.

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