After successful completion of the course, students are able to:

 (In terms of Content)

• Gain knowledge regarding the particular themes of the course,
• Understand and articulate the various contexts that will be discussed in class,

(In terms of Arguments)

• Develop a research topic which is connected to the contents of the course, while being explored and expressed in an academic manner,

(In terms of Method)

• Read across various disciplines, engage abstractly with texts and ollectively discuss them,
• Differentiate between academic and journalistic sources and forms of writing,
• Cultivate methodological skills to write in a manner adequate to academic research (principles of library and internet research, correct handling of quotation and bibliography, primary forms of argumentation).

As the Sun Falling Round

Hospitality and Inventiveness

Thinking of hospitality in terms of invention. What could it mean to do that? And why try? Could we think of it with respect to today’s amalgamation of modes of inhabitation involving beings of human and non-human affiliation? How to let them come, to let them arrive? How to cultivate figures of hospitality in which habits do not engulf or fortify us but leak into more active, more spectral and perhaps even more exuberant manners of living well together today?

Philosophy, architecture, poetry, mythology and science will help us circle around these questions by offering us instruments to think of hospitality in solar terms. Let us postpone attention to the psychology of what is commonly meant by love, and attend to the falling round of the sun. Let us go solar, let us call for a more cosmic, impersonal and diffuse receptivity that plays no favorites, that is less emotional than magnetic or caloric, that floats in the interlude between doubt and decision, between disposition and action. Solarity as gravitation and photons, the sharing of a common physics, but also as a call to practice an inventive equanimity that actively hovers or lingers, that “witnesses and waits”: a radical impartiality letting things macerate in folds and angles that have not yet set home into our sensibility. 

Thinking of hospitality under the sunlight might thus invite us to engage with the physicality of things and events by tempering solar sympathies; cosmic attunements that integrate by remaining vulnerable, that are lacunar yet exuberant, never taxonomic, never prescriptive. Being with rather than being as, the circumnavigation of empathy and its wish for epistemic colonization, resonance and reverberation, withness, the wish for oxygenating things in view of activating unfamiliar or even unknown manners of sharing the cosmos.

Readings

1. Jane Bennett, Influx and Efflux: Writing up with Walt Whitman. London: Duke University Press, 2020. [With special attention to the chapter 3 “Solar Judgment]

2. Emanuele Coccia, Filosofia della Casa: Lo spazio domestico e la felicità. Milano, Giulio Einaudi Editore, 2021. [With special attention to the chapters “Introduzione. La casa oltre la città”, “Armadi”]

3. Rick Dolphijn, The Philosophy of Matter, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. [With special attention to Part 2 “This is not the Earth!”]

4. Catharine Malabou, “The Relation between habit and the fold” (Lecture). EGS, August 12, 2017, Saas-Fee Switzerland. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EglV1eVTrpU]

5. Michel Serres, Hominiscence, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. [With special attention to chapter 12 “Contemporary Humanity”]

6. Iris van der Tuin and Nanna Verhoeff, Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022. [With special attention to the term “Habit”]

7. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. London: Kessinger Publishing, 2010. [With special attention to the poem “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”]

8. Lars Spuybroek, The Sympathy of Things. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. [With special attention to the chapter 3 “Abstraction and Sympathy”]

The seminar is structured around the concept of Hospitality conceived in solar terms and in its relation to the Anthropocene. From this base, each student will cultivate and deploy their specific line of thought, which will be accommodated through three different resources:

• In class group conversations

• Week to week writing exercises

• Optional meetings outside class time to prepare the essay of 8 - 12 pages that each student is submitting at the end of the course.

Mondays    14:00 - 16:00
at: ATTP Seminar Room (Wiedner Hauptstr. 7, Stiege 2, Stock 1)

Start: 06.03.2023

Please consider the plagiarism guidelines of TU Wien when writing your seminar paper: Directive concerning the handling of plagiarism (PDF)

The evaluation considers the participation in class and the delivery of a paper of 8 - 12 pages according to the following criteria:

• Active participation and engagement in the seminar discussions.

• Capacity to engage with the concepts and contents of the course in an inventive manner.

• Continued participation in the exercises

• Capacity to identify a topic study, a specific angle for such study, to develop arguments and an adequate method.

• Capacity to distinguish academic research from critic and journalistic prose.

• Sophistication of the research topic and capacity to articulate it in the paper.

• Academic formatting of the research paper and general attention to the presentation (written and oral).