Modernity considers itself both as a historical epoch and as a unique attitude among all human cultures. A period of time -as the manuals say- and, at the same time, a particular way of situating oneself in it and of living -according to Foucault. On the other hand, the moderns have tried in a thousand ways to define what this singularity consists of, without coming up with a definitive answer. The question ¿what does it mean to be modern?¿ always necessarily remains open: in the temporal aspect -when does it start and end?-, in the spatial aspect -is modernity a matter for Westerners, for certain Westerners?-, and in the qualitative aspect -what does it mean to be modern? ?-
The course will address the question through the time axis, through the historical form of the beginnings and possible endings of what is called Modernity, to analyze in them some of the central concepts that are played out in them and that, inevitably, mark our current situation: time and space, experience and memory, nature and culture. On the template of a "classical modernity", a "late modernity" and a "current" that are being revealed as an ecological catastrophe, questions of social criticism, rationalization and loss of meaning, or the place of the human. Also, in the end, the relativization and reorientation of the entire modern program that is given by the ecological crisis and the epochal rupture of the Anthropocene.
. CLASSICAL MODERNITY
Introduction to the course. The birth of History and the modern experience of time.
Text: KOSELLECK: ¿Future Past of the Beginning of Modernity¿ in Koselleck (1991).
At the two extremes of modernity understood as history. Between Enlightenment and Critical Theory.
Texts: Kant: Idea for a universal history in a cosmopolitan sense
Benjamin, Walter, On the concept of history
Are moderns really that modern? The dispute over secularization.
Text: Löwith, World History and Salvation. (fragments)
Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. (fragments)
University or provincialism? Leaving Europe.
Text: Dipesh Chakrabarty. Outside of Europe. Postcolonial thought and historical difference. (first part)
The question of experience. How does a modern Westerner relate to the world?
Text: Gumbrecht. Production of presence (first chapter)
II. LATE MODERNITY, OR WHATEVER IT'S CALLED
Experience, time and immediacy. One final critical review.
Text: GÓMEZ RAMOS: ¿The immediacy of the crisis and the experience of time¿, in Cadahia&Velasco (2013)
Craig Ireland, The Subaltern Appeal to Experience. Self-Identity, Late Modernity and the Politics of Immediacy.
Gentle descriptions of the last man.
Text: Gumbrecht, Lento present. Madrid, Escolar and ayo 2011 (chap.)
Fukuyama, The end of history and the last man
Acceleration Diagnosis I
Text: Rosa, H. Acceleration and estrangement
A belated conscience. What if it had all been presumption?
Latour, We have never been modern
Is time out of your mind? Compensation, presenteeism, and other strategies for a broken time.
Text: Assmann, Aleida, Is Time out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime. (fragments)
Return time to its place: reinvent the modern (Latour) or relearn the past (Assmann)
Text: Assmann, Aleida, Is Time out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime. (fragments)
Latour, B. ¿The recall of Modernity¿
III. AND NOW?
Rhythm changes. Han. From biopolitics to psychopolitics?
Text: Byung Chul Han, The Tiredness Society
Byung Chul Han, Psychopolitics
A new era, or a larger framework: Anthropocene and modernity.
Text: Chakrabarty, ¿Humanities in the Anthropocene¿
