Written collaboratively by two undergraduate students and one professor, this article explores what it would mean to teach existentialism ''existentially.'' We conducted a survey of how Existentialism is currently taught in universities across North America, concluding that, while existentialism courses tend to resemble other undergraduate philosophy courses, existentialist texts challenge us to rethink conventional teaching practices. Looking to thinkers like Kierkegaard, Beauvoir and Arendt for insights into the nature of pedagogy, as well as recent work by Gert Biesta, we lay out the four qualities that we propose characterize ''existentialist'' teaching practices: an emphasis on teaching over learning and on the ''how'' over the what; the cultivation of newness as well as capacities for resistance. Reflecting on the significance of existentialism for classroom dynamics, we conclude by examining the tensions between existentialist commitments to freedom and prevailing trends in higher education. This essay raises questions about the emancipatory potential of existentialist philosophies, especially in the context of undergraduate classrooms.
In this paper, I will attempt to conceptualize the event through Derrida’s late lecture “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” which he presented “spontaneously” at the Canadian Centre of Architecture in Montreal on April 1st 1997. Furthermore, I will analyze how a certain conception of the event emerges out of the conversations between Derrida, J.L. Austin, and John Searle, especially considering the essay that “started” the much-discussed debate between Derrida and the Anglo-American speech act theorists; namely, through a reading of Austin’s How to Do Things With Words. Derrida’s “concepts” of iterability and the perverformative will be mobilized to think through the ways the event, if it can be written that it exists, is undoubtedly beyond the categories of the performative and constative; however, recourse to the many impossible-possible aporias that populate Derrida’s late texts such as the decision, forgiveness, and invention will be necessary to understand this difficult position. The symptom and the secret, then, will be related to the event through an interrogation of “verticality” while analyzing the event’s capacity to disrupt established modalities of temporality.
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