Is it still possible to imagine politics beyond confrontation, polarization, and entrenched ideologies?
This course focuses on three contemporary thinkers - Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj Žižek - whose interventions open new ways of understanding the meaning of the political.

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Derrida challenges us to rethink borders and strangers through his ethics of hospitality, and to reconceive the “enemy” as the latent friend, destabilizing the very ground of antagonism, and forcing us to reconsider the inherited logics of conflict, exclusion, and belonging that shape both our institutions and our personal encounters.

 

Deleuze shifts our attention to “micropolitics,” where power moves less through grand institutions than through the minute flows of desire, affect, and social machines that animate everyday life. By tracing politics at the molecular level, Deleuze offers tools for perceiving how change can emerge not only from sweeping revolutions but also from subtle shifts in habits, relations, and modes of thought.

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Žižek lays bare the machinery of ideology itself, deploying psychoanalysis to show how our deepest convictions and social realities are scripted by unconscious fantasies. These fantasies both sustain the social order and, at their breaking points, expose its fragility. For Žižek, such cracks in the ideological script are not only symptoms to be explained, but potential openings for moments of genuine political transformation.

 

Throughout the course we’ll ask: What does it mean to welcome the other without erasing the boundaries that make them different? How might politics emerge within the intimate spaces of everyday encounters, rather than solely within hierarchical structures? And how might the blind spots of our collective imaginaries become points of departure for a more open, as yet uncharted, form of life?