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Glossary

272 terms

Glossary

The terms the lectures lean on, as Marci Shore uses them in European Intellectual History since Nietzsche. Each definition is our paraphrase. Where she gives an image for a term it follows, marked as hers, and each term links to the minute she introduces it. Choose a term to see it on the map, with the claims that use it.

A

L13

abandonment (délaissement)Sartre's inflection of thrownness: we are placed in the world and left there, with no God and nothing to lean on.Hear Shore introduce it · L13 29:13 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 13

aesthetic justification of existenceNietzsche's claim that only as an aesthetic phenomenon, through great creation, can a dreadful world be justified.Hear Shore introduce it · L6 19:08 ↗

L10

aestheticism / art for art's sakeEscape into art as refuge; a strand of first-wave modernism licensed to explore how the world looks from inside.Hear Shore introduce it · L10 16:12 ↗

L1, L3, L4, L5, L6, L7, L10, L12, L14, L18, L19

alienation (Entfremdung)In Shore's framing, the central problem of modernity: the felt homelessness of being in the world once God's unifying framework is gone and nothing stable has replaced it.Hear Shore introduce it · L1 44:19 ↗ · On the handout for lectures 4, 5, 14, 18

L17

alterity (altérité)Otherness as both radical and grounding: the other stands across a border I cannot cross or possess.Hear Shore introduce it · L17 40:18 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 17

amour propreRousseau's term for the artificial vanity, pride and self-love produced by living under others' competitive gaze in society, as opposed to natural self-love.Hear Shore introduce it · L3 20:03 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 3

L22

anti-foundationalismThe view that no foundation for knowledge or meaning is possible, as opposed to swapping in a new foundation.Hear Shore introduce it · L22 30:29 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 22

L23

anti-politics (anti-political politics)Challenging power through moral force outside politics, avoiding a rival political program so as to stay uncompromised by political maneuvering.Hear Shore introduce it · L23 32:46 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 23

L12

anxiety / dread (Angst) vs. fearFear targets a definite thing; Angst has no object and discloses the nothingness of our finite existence.Shore's image. Fear of snakes, spiders or airplanes always has an object; Angst is fear of nothing.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 41:22 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 12

L22

aporia (double bind)A moment where meaning undermines itself and leaves an impasse between incompatible readings, so that no determinate meaning can be had.Shore's image. Stalinist terror's demand for constant vigilance sat beside a claim that history's iron laws already guaranteed the outcome.Hear Shore introduce it · L22 38:10 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 22

L10, L19

arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (signifiant / signifié)The tie between signifier (sound or letters) and signified (the concept) is conventional, not natural.Shore's image. No law of physics makes the sound "dog" refer to the furry animal outside.Hear Shore introduce it · L10 20:22 ↗

L21

archaeology (of knowledge) (archéologie)Foucault's 1960s method: reconstruct, from texts, the rules governing what can be said in a given period, and mark the breaks between periods, without seeking origins or causes.Shore's image. The historian as archaeologist, digging not through soil but through layers of words, papers and sources.Hear Shore introduce it · L21 43:34 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 21

L22

arche (first principle, origin) (archē)An absolute origin or foundational first principle that would ground a structure and keep its meaning stable.Hear Shore introduce it · L22 27:53 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 22

L10, L11

art as representation vs. art as transformationThe avant-garde's shift from art as a mirror of the world to art as a hammer that shapes it.Shore's image. Not a mirror but a hammer.Hear Shore introduce it · L11 1:10 ↗

L3, L12

authenticity (Eigentlichkeit / Uneigentlichkeit)Owning one's existence instead of living by convention. For Rousseau, resisting society's false politeness; for Heidegger (Eigentlichkeit), facing one's finitude and deciding for oneself rather than going along with "the they."Hear Shore introduce it · L3 20:51 ↗ · On the handout for lectures 3, 12

L10

automatization (habituation) (автоматизация)Shklovsky's term: habit makes us recognize things without seeing them, until art returns sensation.Hear Shore introduce it · L10 30:11 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 10

L10

avant-garde / second-wave (high) modernismThe flight from subjectivity, around and after the First World War, into radical formal and temporal experiment: freed words, cult of youth, art as creation, internationalism.Shore's image. Free fall on an amusement-park drop ride: thrilling, but with nothing to catch you.Hear Shore introduce it · L10 4:16 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 10

L19

avunculateThe close social bond between maternal uncle and nephew, Lévi-Strauss's test case for reading a kinship relation within a whole system.Hear Shore introduce it · L19 43:00 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 19

B

L13, L16

bad faith (mauvaise foi)Self-deception: lying to oneself, typically by denying one's freedom and responsibility, for instance by pleading determinism, fate or one's nature.Hear Shore introduce it · L13 40:24 ↗ · On the handout for lectures 13, 16

L15

the banality of evilArendt's description, from the Eichmann trial, of monstrous deeds committed by an ordinary, clichéd, thoughtless functionary rather than a monstrous character.Hear Shore introduce it · L15 45:02 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 15

L5, L9

base and superstructureIn Marx, the base is society's economic structure, its forces and relations of production; the superstructure is the legal, political and ideological forms resting on it. In the lecture, the base determines the superstructure, consciousness included.Hear Shore introduce it · L5 46:02 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 5

L12

Being vs. a being (Sein / Seiendes) (Sein / ein Seiendes)Being is the uncountable verbal noun "to be"; a being is a countable entity. English often collapses the two.Shore's image. Being is uncountable, while beings can be counted off one, two, three, four, like human beings.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 16:32 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 12

L3, L4, L7

being vs. becoming (Sein / Werden)Whether identity and history are a fixed state to be understood (being) or an open, self-created process (becoming); Romantics prize becoming.Hear Shore introduce it · L3 18:02 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 4

L12

being-in-the-world / always already (In-der-Welt-Sein / immer schon)Dasein is never outside the world looking in; it is always already involved in it, using things and living among others.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 24:14 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 12

L12

being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode)Human existence is finite and always heading toward death; authentic existence keeps this in view instead of fleeing it.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 38:36 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 12

L12, L17

Being-with (Mitsein, Mitwelt) (Mitsein / Mitwelt)Dasein's world is always shared: to be in the world is to be with other beings, not a solitary subject.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 26:17 ↗ · On the handout for lectures 12, 17

L15

belief that everything is possibleThe totalitarian conviction that there are no limits to what can be done to people, underlying the claim that everything is permitted.Hear Shore introduce it · L15 43:03 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 15

BildungsromanA coming-of-age novel form; Shore reads the Phenomenology as the Bildungsroman of consciousness maturing toward self-understanding.Hear Shore introduce it · L4 21:10 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 4

L19

binary oppositionPaired contrasting terms (raw/cooked, hot/cold, high/low) through which classical structuralism maps cultural meaning by difference.Hear Shore introduce it · L19 43:52 ↗

biography as methodShore's methodological credo, borrowed from Brzozowski: ideas matter only as embedded in the lives of real, imperfect people in a real time and place; anything else is abstraction.Hear Shore introduce it · L1 24:31 ↗

Bolshevism / Menshevism (большевики (majority) / меньшевики (minority))The majority and minority factions the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party split into in 1903 over Lenin's proposed vanguard-party modification of Marxism.Hear Shore introduce it · L8 27:27 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 8

L5, L10

bourgeoisieThe new middle class defined not by inherited title but by owning the factories and employing others' labor for profit.Shore's image. Illustrated via Fiddler on the Roof: Perchik, retelling the story of Jacob and Rachel, notes the "problem" was that Laban was an employer — introducing "employer" as a loaded Marxist term.Hear Shore introduce it · L5 27:20 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 10

L10, L19

bracketing (parenthesizing the referent)Formalists set aside what words refer to and study how language works in itself; Shore compares the move to Husserl's bracketing.Shore's image. Put something in parentheses and set it aside.Hear Shore introduce it · L10 27:41 ↗

C

L5, L15

capital (Kapital)Money invested specifically to generate more money, as distinct from ordinary money used to buy goods for consumption.Shore's image. Capital is not coffee, running-shoe or grocery money but money set aside to breed more money; its accumulation plays the role of original sin, as property does in Rousseau.Hear Shore introduce it · L5 40:59 ↗

L12, L14

care (Sorge)Dasein is never a neutral onlooker; it is always concerned about, and busy with, things and others in its world.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 26:17 ↗

L3, L6

categorical imperative (kategorischer Imperativ)Kant's test for a moral maxim: act only as you could will that everyone act, regardless of the act's consequences.Shore's image. Asks: what if everybody acted on the principle I'm acting on now? If that would be a disaster, you are probably making an exception for yourself.Hear Shore introduce it · L3 31:51 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 3

childhood sexuality (infantile Sexualität)Freud's claim that sexual desire begins in infancy and is defined far beyond genital intercourse; its repression in childhood is formative and traumatic.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 26:36 ↗

L2, L9

civilizationThe Enlightenment's word for humanity's shared achievements, claimed as universal; Shore stresses that in practice it meant a European, even Parisian, standard. Freud's Kultur is translated the same way.Hear Shore introduce it · L2 3:35 ↗ · On the handout for lectures 2, 9

L11

clarity and distinctness (Klarheit und Deutlichkeit)Descartes's criterion of certainty, taken up by Husserl as an ideal of vivid, transparent pure seeing.Shore's image. Husserl's obsession with lenses (microscopes, binoculars, monocles, spectacles, though not frames) is offered as more than a metaphor for his obsession with seeing the world clearly.Hear Shore introduce it · L11 22:57 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 11

L5, L8

class consciousnessIn Marx, workers' recognition that the bourgeoisie exploits them and that only a worldwide collective uprising will end it.Shore's image. Reaching class consciousness compared to understanding Hegel's "the true is the whole": grasping how all the pieces fit together, not fixing one grievance at a time.Hear Shore introduce it · L5 43:12 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 5

L2, L11, L12

cogito, ergo sum"I think, therefore I am": the one certainty radical doubt cannot dissolve, since doubting itself proves a thinking self exists.Hear Shore introduce it · L2 16:12 ↗ · On the handout for lectures 2, 11, 12

L13

commitment (engagement) (engagement (adj. engagé))The demand that thinkers and writers take a stand and involve themselves in the world instead of withdrawing from it.Hear Shore introduce it · L13 23:27 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 13

commodificationMarx's charge that capitalism turns human relations into relations among things and people into commodities.Hear Shore introduce it · L5 42:38 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 5

L17

community of monadsHusserl's picture of many separate egos, each a monad, whose harmony together constitutes one identical world.Hear Shore introduce it · L17 5:57 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 17

L23

complicity of the populationHavel's claim that ordinary people sustain a lying regime by going along, and so share responsibility for it while also suffering under it.Hear Shore introduce it · L23 42:07 ↗

continental vs. analytic philosophyA split dating to the early 20th century between Anglo-American analytic philosophy (logical, technical, contradiction-averse) and continental philosophy (historically conscious, tolerant of contradiction); this course is almost entirely continental.Shore's image. Contrasts with analytic philosophy's "brain in a vat" thought experiments: history never purifies ideas from real, embodied lives — "the brain is never in a vat."Hear Shore introduce it · L1 25:44 ↗

L7, L10, L19

contingencyThe openness of the future: accident and choice mean that multiple outcomes are always possible; the opposite of determinism.Hear Shore introduce it · L7 23:25 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 7

the continuous and the discreteBergson's master distinction: what can be counted as separate units versus an unbroken flow with no gaps. Lived time is the flow; cutting it into units treats it as if it were laid out in space.Shore's image. Cantor's two infinities: whole numbers 1, 2, 3 versus the points on a number line, where infinitely many lie between any two. Time is like the line.Hear Shore introduce it · L7 4:30 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 7

Copernican revolution (Kant)Kant's reversal: instead of the mind conforming to the world, what we can know of the world must conform to the mind's structures.Hear Shore introduce it · L2 38:03 ↗

L20

crisis of differentiationA cultural emergency caused by too little difference. The lecture credits the idea to Lévi-Strauss; in Girard's text it is the "crisis of distinctions."Hear Shore introduce it · L20 11:15 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 20

L10

crisis of representationArt and literature doubt that mirroring the objective world is their job and ask how, or whether, to represent it.Shore's image. Should art be a mirror or a camera, or paint the world as a flower garden?Hear Shore introduce it · L10 5:48 ↗

L14

Critical TheoryThe Frankfurt School's eclectic fusion of philosophy with empirical social science; in Shore's judgment better at critique than at proposing a doctrine.Shore's image. Like Marx turning Hegel on his head, but here abstract philosophy is deliberately combined with concrete empirical social science.Hear Shore introduce it · L14 34:29 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 14

cyclical vs linear timePremodern time turns in cycles of seasons and holidays; modern time has direction. Shore lists this as one of several ways to frame temporality.Hear Shore introduce it · L7 2:54 ↗

D

L12

das Man (the "they") and the they-self (das Man / das Man-selbst)The anonymous "one" whose norms govern everyday life; the they-self is the Dasein that simply does what one does.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 34:06 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 12

L12

Dasein (being-there)Heidegger's word for human existence, replacing "subject" and "consciousness": the entity for whom its own being is at issue.Shore's image. Your cat, a bumblebee or a wild pig cannot ask what Being means; only we can.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 18:02 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 12

L1, L6, L9, L10

the death of God (Gott ist tot)Nietzsche's declaration that God is dead. In Shore's framing it is the course's central hinge, prepared by the Enlightenment's sidelining of God.Shore's image. Compares its irreversibility to the storming of the Bastille for Hegel: once said, it cannot be taken back, and we must live with the consequences.Hear Shore introduce it · L1 20:29 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 6

L19

decentering of the subject (structuralist anti-humanism)The individual human subject is not the origin or holder-together of meaning; structures and language are primary, and subjects are produced by them.Hear Shore introduce it · L19 10:48 ↗

L7, L13, L14

decisionismIn the lecture, the existentialist view that all moral weight falls on the individual's act of choosing, foreshadowed by Bergson. In political theory the word usually refers to Carl Schmitt, for whom the sovereign's decision, not a norm, founds law.Shore's image. A children's book about a hippopotamus who must decide for herself whether to join the other animals' jog, or stay behind.Hear Shore introduce it · L7 32:48 ↗

L22

deconstruction (déconstruction)Derrida's practice of reading that takes apart binaries and claims to stable, determinate meaning; undoing rather than smashing. He denied it was a method. The word was inspired by Heidegger.Hear Shore introduce it · L22 19:09 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 22

deismThe position that God created the world and endowed reason, then stepped back; it sits between orthodox Christianity and atheism.Hear Shore introduce it · L2 25:15 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 2

determinate negationThe specific way one state of affairs is canceled by what negates it, yet carried forward rather than simply erased.Hear Shore introduce it · L4 33:41 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 4

L4, L9, L14

dialectic (Dialektik)History advances through clashing contradictions: an unstable position is negated by its opposite and carried forward to a new, higher stage.Shore's image. An apple tree's growth — seed, sprout, bud, flower, fruit — where each stage cancels and supersedes the one before it on the way to the apple.Hear Shore introduce it · L4 32:56 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 4

dialectical materialismHegel's dialectic put on a materialist footing: history moves through conflicts rooted in economic life, not in Geist. The label belongs to later Marxism; Engels spoke of the materialist conception of history.Hear Shore introduce it · L5 22:14 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 5

the dialogism of ideasIdeas are never produced in isolation or ex nihilo; they cross borders, pick up contingent and accidental influences, and are reshaped by later readers who redirect them beyond their authors' intent.Hear Shore introduce it · L1 32:01 ↗

dictatorship of the proletariatIn Marx, a transitional phase of proletarian rule, which he held necessary because the bourgeoisie would not surrender its property voluntarily.Hear Shore introduce it · L5 43:40 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 5

L22

différance (difference and deferral)Derrida's coinage joining "to differ" and "to defer": meaning depends on difference from other signs and is always postponed, never finally complete.Shore's image. Cat means cat because it is not bat, cap or hat, and also not house or boat: the differences pile up without end.Hear Shore introduce it · L22 27:07 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 22

dignity vs. priceWhat can be exchanged for an equivalent has a price; what admits no equivalent has dignity — persons, as ends in themselves, have the latter.Hear Shore introduce it · L3 34:24 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 3

L2, L3, L11, L19

Ding an sich (thing-in-itself)The mind-independent world as it is in itself, which for Kant really exists but which we can never directly access.Shore's image. Called "one of those German phrases you should learn and use to impress people at cocktail parties."Hear Shore introduce it · L2 37:40 ↗ · On the handout for lectures 3, 11

L21

discipline and surveillance (surveiller et punir)Modern institutions govern people by isolating, observing and classifying them; Foucault takes this to be modernity's central pattern after the Enlightenment.Hear Shore introduce it · L21 29:21 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 21

L21

discontinuity (rupture, threshold, break) (discontinuité)A point where the way something is spoken of changes; the archaeologist records the shift without explaining it.Shore's image. Hitting a new tectonic plate: the point where one layer of discourse gives way to another.Hear Shore introduce it · L21 43:19 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 21

L21

discourseStructured ways of speaking, organized in networks of statements, that shape knowledge, carry power and produce meaning and agency in place of a sovereign subject.Shore's image. Grad-school mnemonic: a bar floor littered with peanut shells, from a department rule that charged a dollar each time someone said "discourse."Hear Shore introduce it · L21 11:58 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 21

L2, L3

disenchantment (Entzauberung)Max Weber's term for the retreat of miracles, mythical forces, and magic from how people understand the world.Hear Shore introduce it · L2 9:50 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 2

L21

dispersed (omnipresent) powerPower with no central point: relational, generated everywhere, immanent in every relationship and always accompanied by resistance arising within it.Hear Shore introduce it · L21 38:23 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 21

L20

double transference (pharmakos) (pharmakos (scapegoat); pharmakon (poison and remedy))The group attributes both the earlier chaos and the restored peace to the victim, who thus appears as poison and cure at once.Hear Shore introduce it · L20 41:32 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 20

dual powerThe post-abdication arrangement in which two rival authorities — the bourgeois-liberal Provisional Government and the more socialist Petrograd Soviet — both claimed power in Petrograd.Hear Shore introduce it · L8 40:19 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 8

duration (durée)Time as a continuous, irreversible, lived flow in which past and present interpenetrate, rather than a row of countable instants.Shore's image. Grilled cheese: cut slices sit apart on the bread, then melt into one another when cooked, leaving no gaps or hard boundaries.Hear Shore introduce it · L7 15:18 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 7

E

economism / trade unionism / spontaneityLenin's cluster of terms for workers' demands confined to immediate material improvements (pay, hours) rather than revolutionary transformation of the whole system.Hear Shore introduce it · L8 19:14 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 8

the ego (das Ich)"The I": the self that has to negotiate, moment by moment, between the id's wants and the superego's prohibitions with little room for compromise.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 32:18 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 9

L11, L17

egocentric predicament / solipsismThe picture of the mind as a windowless box from which nothing but its own contents can be known for certain.Hear Shore introduce it · L11 18:38 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 11

élan vitalA generative life force, acting on inert matter, that makes living beings creative and drives evolution along divergent, unpredictable lines.Shore's image. Bergson's own image, relayed by Shore: life is like an exploding artillery shell that bursts into fragments, not a cannonball flying to one target.Hear Shore introduce it · L7 31:36 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 7

L18, L25

embeddedness (thrownness into history) (Geworfenheit)Heideggerian idea, via Kosík: we are always-already thrown into history yet also act on and transform it — an interactive, not one-way, relation.Hear Shore introduce it · L18 41:09 ↗

L17

empathy (Einfühlung)Literally "feeling into": the act through which Stein has me grasp another's body and experience as like mine, and myself as others see me.Hear Shore introduce it · L17 21:25 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 17

empiricismKnowledge gained through sensory experience, observation, and experimentation, modeled on Newton's discovery of physical laws.Hear Shore introduce it · L2 11:06 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 2

L19

encounter (face-to-face)An idea Shore borrows in part from Józef Tischner, who drew on Levinas: the meeting of one subject with another as the critical moment of drama and, in some ways, the ground of ontology.Hear Shore introduce it · L19 1:52 ↗

EncyclopédieDiderot and d'Alembert's project to categorize, organize, and make accessible all human knowledge, a symbol of the Enlightenment's whole attitude; Rousseau contributed articles.Hear Shore introduce it · L2 31:37 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 2

L16

engaged literature (littérature engagée)The idea that writers and philosophers must take a stand, above all political, rather than write from detachment.Hear Shore introduce it · L16 18:09 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 16

L9, L14

Eros and Thanatos (Ἔρως / Θάνατος)Freud's two basic classes of drive: Eros, the life drive of sex and love, and the death drive, a pull toward the inorganic that shows as aggression when turned outward. In the lecture, Thanatos is aggression and killing.Shore's image. Shore likens them to postulates of geometry: Freud does not prove them, he simply posits them as hardwired.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 33:05 ↗ · On the handout for lectures 9, 14

L6, L7

eternal recurrence / eternal return (ewige Wiederkehr)Nietzsche's contested idea of eternity; Shore lists a Kantian reading, an every-moment-belongs-to-the-whole reading and a Bergsonian time-as-flow reading.Shore's image. A river in which you are always moving and past connects to present.Hear Shore introduce it · L6 40:45 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 6

L13

existence precedes essence (l'existence précède l'essence)No human nature is fixed in advance; people first exist, then determine what they are through their own choices and actions.Hear Shore introduce it · L13 31:07 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 13

F

L17

face-to-face (Levinas) (face à face)Levinas's ultimate situation: meeting the other's face, which discloses their infinity and puts me in question.Hear Shore introduce it · L17 40:49 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 17

L13, L18

facticity and transcendence (in-itself / for-itself) (en-soi / pour-soi)Facticity is the given of one's situation and past; transcendence is consciousness going beyond it. Shore places them close to Sartre's in-itself and for-itself.Shore's image. One can walk down the steps or jump off the stage, but not suddenly sprout wings and fly; that lies outside the facticity of the situation.Hear Shore introduce it · L13 34:29 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 13

L12

falling / fallenness (Verfallen) and idle talk (Gerede) (Verfallen / Gerede)Everyday Dasein's absorption in the world and the crowd: gossip, trivial curiosity and ambiguity in place of clear self-owned decisions.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 35:33 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 12

L14

fellow traveler (попутчик (Poputchik))A communist sympathizer who supports the revolution's aims without taking on the Party's disciplined, dangerous, all-consuming commitment.Hear Shore introduce it · L14 4:01 ↗

L15

the fictitious world of ideologyAn ideologically constructed reality that removes contingency and is consistent within itself, so that truth and fiction can no longer be told apart.Hear Shore introduce it · L15 40:00 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 15

finalism (teleology)The view that life develops toward a goal fixed from the start; Bergson rejects it because it leaves no room for contingency or free will.Hear Shore introduce it · L7 27:08 ↗

L10

first-wave modernism (inward turn)Roughly 1890 to WWI: art turns inward to a radically subjective, unstable self; alienation, despair, apocalypse, Freud as guru.Hear Shore introduce it · L10 4:02 ↗

L12

forgetting of Being (Seinsvergessenheit)Heidegger's charge that philosophy since the Greeks has neglected the question of Being, fixating on knowledge and entities instead.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 15:46 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 12

L24, L25

forgivenessPardoning a wrong: for Arendt the remedy for irreversibility, for Derrida something meaningful only as forgiving the unforgivable.Hear Shore introduce it · L24 42:29 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 24

L23

fraternal assistance (bratrská pomoc)The official phrase for the August 1968 invasion, widely understood to be false, making it the emblem of language used to feign truth.Hear Shore introduce it · L23 18:25 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 23

free willCapacity for spontaneous, self-determining action not fixed in advance; Kant postulates it, Bergson claims to ground it in the nature of time.Hear Shore introduce it · L7 23:13 ↗

L16

freedom (existential) (liberté)In Beauvoir, the burdensome human capacity to go beyond one's situation and create values; the highest value, always exercised within a given situation.Hear Shore introduce it · L16 22:30 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 16

G

L4, L9

Geist (Spirit)The whole of collective, historical life in which individuals gain meaning: "the I that is a we, the we that is an I."Shore's image. Team spirit: hitting a ball alone means nothing; the same swing is a home run only inside the rules, history, and context of the whole team.Hear Shore introduce it · L4 26:43 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 4

genealogical fallacyJudging an idea by where it came from, such as its author's life or era, rather than on its merits; usually called the genetic fallacy. In the lecture, analytic philosophers use it to keep history out of philosophy.Hear Shore introduce it · L1 27:45 ↗

general will (volonté générale)Rousseau's irreducible collective political authority — not majority vote or the sum of individual wills, but a thing unto itself.Hear Shore introduce it · L2 32:45 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 2

L22

generalized text (everything is a text)Derrida's stretching of "text" and "writing" beyond books to include gestures, culture and life generally, so anything can be read and deconstructed.Shore's image. Derrida, lunching in a suburban restaurant, waves at the diners and says everything, even this scene, is a text; a Campbell's soup label counts as much as a novel.Hear Shore introduce it · L22 23:32 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 22

L11

givenness (Gegebenheit)The world and its objects are given to the I, which is the one to whom they appear; consciousness is the starting point.Hear Shore introduce it · L11 32:58 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 11

L10

god-seeking (bogoiskatel'stvo) (богоискательство)Russian term for the early-1900s religious-philosophical search for God; Shore uses it for first-wave modernism's despondent search for a God never found.Hear Shore introduce it · L10 9:30 ↗

L23

the Grand Inquisitor (parable)Ivan Karamazov's parable of a churchman who jails the returned Christ, claiming people prefer secure bread to freedom, while himself disbelieving.Hear Shore introduce it · L23 15:33 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 23

L21

the great confinement (le grand renfermement)Foucault's name for the mass internment, from 1656, of the poor, the idle and the mad in houses that were not medical; he treats it as the forerunner of the asylum.Hear Shore introduce it · L21 26:46 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 21

L23

the greengrocer (Havel's paradigm)Havel's ordinary shopkeeper who displays a slogan nobody believes; his routine compliance shows how everyday conformity keeps a regime running.Shore's image. Shore retells it as a shopkeeper who could bury the sign under rotten tomatoes but fears informers, interrogation and lost privileges for his children.Hear Shore introduce it · L23 40:09 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 23

L11, L19, L25

groundlessness (Bodenlosigkeit)The modern fear that nothing is given or certain: a thrilling yet unbearable freedom for the avant-garde, philosophy's missing foundation for Husserl.Hear Shore introduce it · L11 2:43 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 25

H

L25

hauntology (hantologie)Derrida's word for how Marx's and Hegel's legacies persist as plural spectral presences we can neither dismiss nor fully take up.Hear Shore introduce it · L25 36:24 ↗

L15

the herd (Herde)The lecture's word for the unthinking, conforming mass that follows fascism. Shore uses it of Adorno, Horkheimer and Arendt and links it to Heidegger's das Man.Hear Shore introduce it · L15 8:51 ↗

L12

hermeneutic circle (hermeneutischer Zirkel)To pose a question we must already stand inside some preliminary understanding of what it asks about.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 19:52 ↗

the historian's infinite-regression problemFully explaining any thinker requires explaining their predecessors, without a clean starting point (Stalin needs Lenin, who needs Marx, who needs Hegel, who needs Kant); any syllabus start is somewhat arbitrary.Hear Shore introduce it · L1 34:57 ↗

historical inevitability / determinismAs the lecture presents classical Marxism: the claim that the proletariat's triumph will come as an objective process, without engineered action.Shore's image. Compared to the Calvinist predestination paradox: if salvation (or revolution) is preordained, why act at all — why go to church, why organize?Hear Shore introduce it · L5 49:31 ↗

L5, L9

History (with a capital H)History treated as a quasi-autonomous, directional force with its own dialectical forward momentum, not merely the record of past events.Hear Shore introduce it · L5 12:57 ↗

L23

human-rights discourseThe universal vocabulary of rights, made available by the Helsinki Accords, that became Eastern Europe's language of opposition once Marxist language had lost credibility.Hear Shore introduce it · L23 23:01 ↗

I

the id (das Es)Freud's das Es, "the it": the unconscious store of inborn drives, Eros and the death drive alike, pressing for immediate satisfaction. In the lecture, "pure libido," simply desire.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 32:05 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 9

L16

immanence and transcendence (immanence / transcendance)Beauvoir's pair: confinement in one's given situation as a passive object versus acting on the world to go beyond it.Hear Shore introduce it · L16 44:34 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 16

L15

imperialism (Arendt)Overseas expansion driven by surplus capital and labor; for Arendt the opening stage of bourgeois rule, giving the mob an outlet and reviving nationalism.Hear Shore introduce it · L15 30:03 ↗

L19

incest tabooProhibition on sexual unions within the close family, held by Freud to be among the earliest taboos and taken by Lévi-Strauss as founding kinship.Hear Shore introduce it · L19 43:33 ↗

L17

infinity (Levinas) (l'infini)Levinas's counter-term to totality: the other's absolute transcendence, which no system or grasp by the I can enclose.Hear Shore introduce it · L17 41:02 ↗

intellect and intuitionTwo faculties: intellect analyzes inert matter from outside in separable parts; intuition grasps living reality from inside, holistically and in time.Hear Shore introduce it · L7 38:51 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 7

L11, L12

intentionality (Intentionalität)Consciousness is always directed at an object; subject and object are given together in one relation, which serves as the bridge.Shore's image. Consciousness is like a string with a magnetic arrow attached, always reaching out to grab its object: a "micro teleology." Not intending to call one's mother.Hear Shore introduce it · L11 40:21 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 11

L20

internal vs. external mediationOn a continuum: wide social distance between subject and model restrains rivalry (external); collapsed distance lets it escalate (internal).Shore's image. Two two-year-olds fight far more than a two-year-old and a ten-year-old; likewise a noble and a serf would not compete for the same woman.Hear Shore introduce it · L20 30:44 ↗

L17

intersubjectivityHow one subject relates to, knows and is with another subject, as opposed to how a subject reaches an object.Shore's image. A die on the table: nobody sees all six faces, so classmates at other sides confirm one object; she applies it to writing histories from inside or outside one's group.Hear Shore introduce it · L17 0:25 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 17

L14

iron cage of reason (stahlhartes Gehäuse)"Iron cage" is Talcott Parsons's translation of Weber's stahlhartes Gehäuse, his image for rationalized modern life; following the Frankfurt School, the lecture applies it to Enlightenment reason as calculation.Hear Shore introduce it · L14 44:11 ↗

K

L19

kinship system as languageLévi-Strauss reads a society's family relationships as a sign system: each relation has value only through its differences from the other relations.Hear Shore introduce it · L19 42:15 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 19

kruzhok (reading/study circle) (кружок)A grassroots study circle in which the revolutionary intelligentsia tried to educate factory workers in Marxist theory.Hear Shore introduce it · L8 13:02 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 8

L

laughter as social corrective (Le Rire)Comedy arises when a person behaves like a thing or automaton; laughter is the social gesture that pushes back against such mechanical absentmindedness.Hear Shore introduce it · L7 43:35 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 7

L10, L19

linguistic structuralismMeaning lives in differences within a system, not in things; the background that let avant-gardists detach words from referents.Shore's image. Dog means dog only because it is not cat, bat or hog.Hear Shore introduce it · L10 17:48 ↗

L19

the linguistic turnLater movement to explain history, literature and anthropology in terms of language, treating their objects as linguistic constructs.Hear Shore introduce it · L19 49:37 ↗

L25

liquid modernityBauman's term, from around 2000, for the present phase of modernity, in which solid structures melt and are not replaced by firmer ones. He preferred it to "postmodernity"; in the lecture, Shore uses it for postmodernity.Hear Shore introduce it · L25 34:34 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 25

L17

living body vs. physical body (Leib / Körper)The body felt from inside as one's own living body, versus a body seen from outside as an object among objects.Shore's image. Touching your own hand feels different from touching someone else's: only one living body is ever experienced from inside.Hear Shore introduce it · L17 25:33 ↗

L23

living in truth (žít v pravdě)Havel's stance of refusing the regime's pretenses and acting on what one actually knows, accepting the personal cost; the counter to living a lie.Hear Shore introduce it · L23 42:59 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 23

L17, L18

the look / the gaze of the Other (le regard)Sartre: being seen by another turns me into an object for them, and thereby reveals that they are a subject.Hear Shore introduce it · L17 31:49 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 17

M

L15

the massesArendt's term for the previously disengaged, unorganized majority, too numerous or indifferent for any interest-based body, later drawn into politics by the mob.Hear Shore introduce it · L15 27:59 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 15

master-slave dialectic (lordship and bondage)The lord's mastery depends on recognition from a bondsman he treats as an object, so his apparent independence rests on hidden dependence.Shore's image. Jay Bernstein's point, via Shore: the person we most want rid of is the one who binds us and exposes our dependency.Hear Shore introduce it · L4 42:01 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 4

L12

masters of suspicion (maîtres du soupçon)Paul Ricoeur's name for Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, who treat conscious self-understanding as a mask for hidden forces. In the lecture, Shore also counts Heidegger among them.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 46:32 ↗

mechanismThe Enlightenment picture of nature as a machine whose whole is fully explained by its separable parts; Bergson rejects it as a theory of life.Shore's image. A bicycle, toaster oven or jack-in-the-box: springs, gears and screws fit together logically with no mysticism, so you can study each part in isolation.Hear Shore introduce it · L7 28:07 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 7

L22

meta-narrative (grand narrative) (méta-récit)An overarching story or philosophy claiming to unify and make sense of everything; postmodernity is defined by disbelief in any such story.Hear Shore introduce it · L22 17:52 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 22

metaphysical proletariatA phrase from the lecture for the working class the Bolsheviks claimed to represent in 1917: not Russia's few actual workers but those a rushed industrialization would later create.Hear Shore introduce it · L8 46:01 ↗

L20

mimetic desire (mimesis) (mimesis (imitation))Wanting is borrowed: we desire an object because another person desires it, so desire's source lies outside the desirer.Shore's image. Put two toddlers in a room full of toys: the only toy either wants is the one in the other's hands, however many others there are.Hear Shore introduce it · L20 20:55 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 20

L20

mimetic rivalryCompetition that follows when two imitators want the same limited object; if unchecked it can turn into violence.Hear Shore introduce it · L20 25:30 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 20

L12

mineness (Jemeinigkeit)Each Dasein's existence is irreducibly its own; death, which each of us undergoes alone, is the plainest case.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 44:36 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 12

L15

the mobArendt's technical term for bourgeois society's resentful, excluded underside: gang-like, hating the order that shut it out, sharing its values minus hypocrisy.Hear Shore introduce it · L15 24:33 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 15

modernityA break with tradition conventionally dated from 1789: a shift from cyclical to forward-moving, progressive time. In Shore's account it is experienced as trauma and crisis rather than triumphant progress.Hear Shore introduce it · L1 38:51 ↗

L2, L10

modernity, modernization, modernismThree distinct terms: modernity names an era (dated from 1789), modernization its concrete technical/social changes, modernism the aesthetic response.Hear Shore introduce it · L2 42:24 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 2

L24

mother tongue / murderers' tongue (Muttersprache / Mördersprache)A pairing applied to Celan's postwar German: the language he was raised in and the language of those who killed his people. In the lecture Shore attributes it to Celan.Hear Shore introduce it · L24 2:53 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 24

L20

mythFor Girard, an account of the scapegoat's killing from the killers' standpoint, telling it so as to justify the violence.Hear Shore introduce it · L20 47:29 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 20

N

L11

narcissism of minor differencesFreud's phrase: the smaller the differences between two positions, the more fiercely their holders insist on them. Shore applies it to Husserl.Hear Shore introduce it · L11 13:14 ↗

natalityArendt's term for the arrival of a new being who injects radical contingency into the world, its course unforeseeable.Hear Shore introduce it · L7 49:55 ↗

L11, L12

natural attitude vs. phenomenological attitude (natürliche Einstellung / phänomenologische Einstellung)The natural attitude naively assumes the world exists; the phenomenological attitude is a jolt into reflecting on what consciousness contains.Hear Shore introduce it · L11 42:52 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 11

natural rightsRights (life, liberty, property, equality) held to belong to individuals inherently, prior to and independent of government.Hear Shore introduce it · L2 22:15 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 2

L16

negation of the given (négation du donné) (le donné / négation du donné)Kojève's idea that being human means overcoming and transforming what is given while still bearing its traces.Hear Shore introduce it · L16 15:30 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 16

L23

negative selectionKołakowski's charge that a communist regime promotes precisely its least conscientious people, those lacking conscience and any sense of responsibility.Hear Shore introduce it · L23 7:57 ↗

the new man / engineers of human soulsThe Bolshevik project of re-engineering people so subjectivity is perfectly identified with History; writers and intellectuals serve as "engineers of human souls."Shore's image. Moses waits forty years in the desert for the generation with a slave mentality to die out before a new generation can enter the promised land.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 4:20 ↗

L21

Nietzschean genealogy (Genealogie)Nietzsche's method in On the Genealogy of Morality: tracing values to contingent, often ignoble histories instead of timeless origins. Foucault's own genealogy dates from the 1970s. In the lecture, the inspiration for his archaeology.Hear Shore introduce it · L21 11:01 ↗

nihilismThe crisis in which the highest values lose their value and the principles that organized reality stop organizing it. Shore treats it as another name for God's death.Hear Shore introduce it · L6 45:46 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 6

L23

Normalization (normalizace)The euphemistic name for the return to hardline, Moscow-backed rule in Czechoslovakia after the 1968 invasion, with consumer spending used to buy calm.Hear Shore introduce it · L23 13:23 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 23

L13

nothingness (le néant)The undetermined openness at the heart of human reality; for Sartre it is the space of freedom, whereas for Heidegger it points to death.Hear Shore introduce it · L13 32:12 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 13

O

L14

objectification / instrumental reasonAdorno and Horkheimer's argument that Enlightenment reason turns nature, then other people, into objects known only as things to manipulate.Hear Shore introduce it · L14 45:41 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 14

Oedipus complex (Ödipuskomplex)For Freud, a near-universal childhood stage: the child desires the mother, resents the father, and secretly wishes him gone; the wish is quickly repressed.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 28:42 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 9

L12

ontic vs. ontological (ontisch / ontologisch)Ontic concerns particular entities in the world; ontological concerns Being as such. Dasein is ontically distinctive by being ontological.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 21:25 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 12

L12

ontology vs. epistemology (ontology / epistemology)Ontology asks what it is to be; epistemology asks what we can know. Heidegger insists the former comes first.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 15:00 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 12

opacity of the selfFreud's view that the self is never transparent to itself, because what is most fundamental lies in the unconscious.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 48:02 ↗

L10

ostranenie (defamiliarization, estrangement) (остранение)Making the familiar strange by laying bare the device, so perception wakes from automatized recognition into real seeing.Shore's image. Like the Greek pharmakon, alienation is both the disease and the cure; sleepwalking past cup, pen and tree is the disease.Hear Shore introduce it · L10 28:40 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 10

L16, L17

the Other (l'autre)Another subject, not merely an object for my consciousness; for Beauvoir also the status of a group defined against a dominant Subject.Hear Shore introduce it · L17 2:39 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 17

the owl of MinervaHegel's image that understanding of an era or an action arrives only in retrospect, after it is over, never while it unfolds.Hear Shore introduce it · L4 28:14 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 4

P

L21

panopticonBentham's "all-seeing" prison design: inmates cannot tell when the central guard is looking, so they must always act as if watched.Hear Shore introduce it · L21 29:47 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 21

L23

parallel polis (paralelní polis)Václav Benda's idea of a parallel society of self-organized institutions in which people tell the truth and live in truth alongside the official order.Hear Shore introduce it · L23 44:31 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 23

L10

passéismeFuturist scorn for everything old and crusty; the present is only a moment en route to the future.Hear Shore introduce it · L10 33:21 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 10

permanent revolutionTrotsky's theory that in a backward country like Russia, workers must carry a bourgeois revolution over into a socialist one, which survives only if revolution spreads abroad. In the lecture, his position against Stalin's "socialism in one country."Hear Shore introduce it · L9 2:49 ↗

L11, L17

phenomenological epoché / reduction (bracketing) (epoché (Einklammerung))Suspending, not doubting, the question whether the world is real, so that things can be described exactly as they are given to pure consciousness.Hear Shore introduce it · L11 43:29 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 11

philosopheThe 18th-century French model of the intellectual: cosmopolitan, secular, humanist, uniting philosophical theory with worldly action (praxis).Hear Shore introduce it · L2 24:16 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 2

L22

playThe unbounded interaction of signifiers with one another once no grounding center limits them; also the affirmative, creative face of meaning's instability.Hear Shore introduce it · L22 31:05 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 22

pleasure principle (das Lustprinzip)The id's program: seek immediate satisfaction of desire. Freud holds it can never be carried through and clashes with the world.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 44:44 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 9

L2, L7, L9, L10, L11

positivismUnderstanding the world strictly through empirical observation, with no supernatural forces or metaphysical explanation admitted.Shore's image. Dropping a ball to test gravity: knowledge is what you can observe, count and repeat in a laboratory.Hear Shore introduce it · L2 11:48 ↗ · On the handout for lectures 2, 7

L22

post-structuralismThought that grows out of structuralism and probes its weak points, above all the assumption that a system of signs is closed and stable.Hear Shore introduce it · L22 16:25 ↗

L23

post-totalitarianismHavel's name for the late Soviet-bloc order held together by everyone's ritual compliance rather than by belief or open terror.On the handout for lecture 23

L22

postmodernismA broad current after 1968 that breaks with much modernist thinking and is skeptical of objective truth and of any unifying grand story.Shore's image. Nested layers: postmodernism is the big rubric, post-structuralism a more specific form inside it, deconstruction Derrida's own method inside that.Hear Shore introduce it · L22 1:45 ↗

L21

postmodernity (as Shore frames it)The condition after the last efforts to replace God are given up: no whole, no stable meaning, subject or direction, and general destabilization.Hear Shore introduce it · L21 6:35 ↗

L21

power/knowledge (pouvoir/savoir)Foucault's joined term: knowing is never innocent of power, and power works through knowing, classifying and observing more than through mastery of nature.Shore's image. The slash marks the pairing, as Heidegger's dashes marked his; Shore jokes that Foucault is "into slashes."Hear Shore introduce it · L21 37:31 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 21

L14, L18

praxis (πρᾶξις (praxis))Action that enacts a theory and is shaped by it in turn; more than mere practice.Hear Shore introduce it · L14 36:43 ↗ · On the handout for lectures 14, 18

L22

presence vs. absenceBinary on which the speech-over-writing ranking rests; Derrida argues language is driven more by absence and that presence is an illusion.Hear Shore introduce it · L22 21:39 ↗

primacy of the will (volo ergo sum (vs. cogito ergo sum))Grounding subjectivity in desire and will rather than cognition: "I will, therefore I am" replacing Descartes's "I think, therefore I am."Hear Shore introduce it · L3 36:27 ↗

L22

privileging of speech over writingWestern habit of treating speech as closer to inner truth and writing as a mediated, artificial copy; Derrida targets it in Saussure and Levi-Strauss.Hear Shore introduce it · L22 20:46 ↗

L4, L7, L11, L12, L19

the problem of the bridgeThe epistemological puzzle of how a subject enclosed in its own head can reach an independently existing object or outside world.Shore's image. Shore asks how she can know that her cup of iced tea, the microphone and the audience are real rather than projections of her consciousness.Hear Shore introduce it · L4 9:22 ↗

L21

productive powerPower seen as generative, creating subjects, categories and practices, not only repressing; meant descriptively, without praise or blame.Hear Shore introduce it · L21 40:57 ↗

progressThe Enlightenment's forward-moving, cumulative model of understanding: each discovery builds on those before it toward an ever more complete picture.Shore's image. Isaiah Berlin's jigsaw puzzle: the world is a huge puzzle we haven't finished, but each new piece fitted in makes the next pieces easier to place.Hear Shore introduce it · L2 8:42 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 2

L20

prohibitionNegative rules that forestall mimetic conflict by walling off indivisible objects and preserving category boundaries.Hear Shore introduce it · L20 45:17 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 20

proletariatUrban factory workers who sell their labor by the hour, replacing the peasantry as the dominant laboring class under industrial capitalism.Hear Shore introduce it · L5 28:59 ↗

L10

psychic automatism (automatisme psychique)Surrealist free association: thought expressed without control by reason or aesthetic and moral concern.Hear Shore introduce it · L10 45:00 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 10

psychic economy (closed energy system) (psychische Ökonomie)Drive energy is conserved, only displaced or sublimated; energy spent on repression drains what is left for pleasure. A zero-sum model of the self.Shore's image. Like conservation of matter: energy can be moved around but never gotten rid of.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 36:21 ↗

psychoanalysis (talking cure) (Psychoanalyse)Both theory and treatment: an analyst coaxes the unconscious to surface through free association, so that symptoms can be alleviated by talk alone.Shore's image. Analysand on the couch several times a week, no third-party observer allowed, so training analysts must themselves be analyzed; costly in money and leisure.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 22:51 ↗

L9, L11

psychologism (Psychologismus)The view that logic, truth and evidence are only facts about how minds work; Husserl rejects it.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 18:45 ↗

L15

public vs private sphereThe division between political life and a protected space where one can be left alone; Arendt sees totalitarianism as abolishing the latter.Hear Shore introduce it · L15 40:20 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 15

Q

qualitative vs quantitative multiplicityTwo kinds of manifold: countable, separable units versus heterogeneous states that permeate one another; conscious life is the second kind.Hear Shore introduce it · L7 19:26 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 7

L12

the question of Being (Seinsfrage)The question of what "to be" means, which Heidegger holds is philosophy's proper first task and the subject of Being and Time.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 14:34 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 12

L24

the question of German guilt (Schuldfrage) (Die Schuldfrage)Jaspers's 1946 question of Germans' responsibility for the Nazi era, extending to those who stayed alive while others were taken; he holds that any recovery of truth has to pass through it.Hear Shore introduce it · L24 35:55 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 24

R

L2, L11

radical (Cartesian) doubtDescartes's method of rejecting as false anything not incontrovertibly certain, to find an absolutely solid foundation for knowledge.Hear Shore introduce it · L2 12:40 ↗

L15

radical evilA term Arendt borrowed from Kant, who meant something different, for totalitarian evil: beyond ordinary motives like greed, neither punishable nor forgivable, arising when a system makes people superfluous. She later called evil banal.Hear Shore introduce it · L15 38:14 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 15

L12

ready-to-hand vs. present-at-hand (Zuhandenheit / Vorhandenheit)Things first show up as usable equipment (ready-to-hand); only when use breaks down do they appear as detached objects (present-at-hand).Hear Shore introduce it · L12 27:57 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 12

reality principle (das Realitätsprinzip)The requirement to defer or renounce satisfaction to fit material and social conditions, which makes shared life possible at the cost of happiness.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 44:44 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 9

reasonThe Enlightenment's central "key word": the human faculty held capable of understanding, and progressively mastering, the world.Hear Shore introduce it · L2 2:22 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 2

L4, L16, L17

recognition (Anerkennung)Identity is not self-standing but constituted through being acknowledged by another consciousness, as with the master's dependence on the slave.Shore's image. Barbie and Ken: unlike Ken's "Ken is me" moment of pure self-identity, Hegel holds no one can be self-identical without another's gaze.Hear Shore introduce it · L4 45:29 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 4

L14

reconciliation of subject and objectThe Hegelian promise that thought and reality, or subject and object, can be fully unified in one closed system; Critical Theory refuses this.Hear Shore introduce it · L14 35:13 ↗

L5, L8, L10, L11

reification (Verdinglichung)Turning a relation, process or abstraction into a fixed, thing-like entity. In the lecture's account, Marx charges Hegel with reifying consciousness.Shore's image. Class consciousness imagined as an object you could physically pick up and hand to the workers, like a gift.Hear Shore introduce it · L5 7:38 ↗ · On the handout for lectures 5, 11

religion as infantile illusionFreud's view that God is a projection of the wish for an all-powerful protector, transferred to heaven once one learns the real father's limits.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 40:14 ↗

L1, L6, L9, L19

replacing GodIn Shore's framing, modernity's central task: God once performed epistemological, ontological, and ethical functions at once, and his disappearance leaves an empty space modern thought tries to fill.Hear Shore introduce it · L1 41:28 ↗

L9, L10

repression (Verdrängung)Pushing disturbing desires and memories out of awareness into the unconscious, where they persist; for Freud it underlies neurosis and, on a larger scale, civilization.Shore's image. Parenting is teaching repression: feeling like punching is fine, punching is not.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 23:03 ↗

L21

the repressive hypothesis (l'hypothèse répressive)The familiar view that bourgeois modernity silenced sex; Foucault calls it a myth that overlooks a vast proliferation of talk about sex.Hear Shore introduce it · L21 31:11 ↗

L12

resoluteness (Entschlossenheit)Taking hold of one's existence and owning one's choices, prompted by being shaken into awareness of one's own death.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 44:18 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 12

L13

responsibility (responsabilité)The burden that comes with radical freedom: one owns one's choices, and in choosing acts as a model for humanity.Hear Shore introduce it · L13 39:18 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 13

return of the repressed (die Wiederkehr des Verdrängten)Banished desires and memories never vanish but resurface in disguised forms: symptoms, guilt, slips, or aggression turned against oneself.Shore's image. Yurko Prokhasko's line: what we push out the door comes climbing back in through the window.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 36:55 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 9

revaluation of all values (Umwertung aller Werte)Nietzsche's project of testing the worth of inherited, chiefly Christian, morality and creating new values. In the lecture, it pushes us "beyond good and evil."Hear Shore introduce it · L6 34:40 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 6

L18

revisionist rereading (peeling back to the young Marx)Method of stripping away Stalin, then Lenin, then the deterministic mature Marx to recover the young Marx's humanism, assuming Marxism's truth still lies in the text.Shore's image. Like peeling an onion (Stalin, then Lenin, then mature Marx) or a believer rereading scripture: if something went wrong, the answer must still be in the text.Hear Shore introduce it · L18 22:57 ↗

L15

rightlessness (the stateless without rights)Having no legal standing because no state protects you; Arendt argues human rights are unenforceable outside citizenship.Hear Shore introduce it · L15 35:41 ↗

L20

ritualThe positive counterpart of prohibition: prescribed acts that re-enact the founding sacrifice under control.Hear Shore introduce it · L20 45:54 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 20

L8, L9, L10

rushing historyAccelerating history's predetermined course through deliberate political organization, without changing where it is ultimately headed.Hear Shore introduce it · L8 2:20 ↗

S

L20

the Sacred (Girard's technical sense)The victim, elevated into a god-like figure by the double transference; the sacred is the group's own violence, personified.Hear Shore introduce it · L20 42:11 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 20

L20

sacrificial (mimetic) crisisThe point at which mutual imitation has erased a community's distinctions and reciprocal violence threatens the cultural order itself.Hear Shore introduce it · L20 34:12 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 20

L23

samizdat (самиздат)Self-publication: writing produced and circulated illegally underground under communism, with more room for it in Poland than in Czechoslovakia.Hear Shore introduce it · L23 39:17 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 23

Sapere aude (dare to know)Kant's motto for enlightenment: have the courage to use your own understanding rather than deferring to authority.Hear Shore introduce it · L2 35:29 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 2

L20

scandal (mediator as obstacle)Girard's technical term for the bind in which the imitated model is also the rival blocking one's access to the object.Hear Shore introduce it · L20 29:51 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 20

L20

scapegoat (surrogate victim) (bouc émissaire / victime émissaire)The substitute victim, largely arbitrary and innocent, on whom a divided group converges and onto whom its violence is projected.Hear Shore introduce it · L20 34:53 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 20

L23

the second cultureIvan Jirous's term for the alternative, countercultural scene of underground music and gatherings that grew up outside official Czechoslovak culture.Hear Shore introduce it · L23 27:19 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 23

L3, L10

Sehnsucht (yearning, longing)The specifically Romantic longing for an object that can never be attained, where the longing itself is valued more than the object.Hear Shore introduce it · L3 15:55 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 3

L10

self-conscious avant-garde internationalismAfter WWI created nation-states and passports, avant-gardists deliberately crossed and rejected borders, unlike prewar innocent cosmopolitanism.Hear Shore introduce it · L10 38:00 ↗

L19

semiology (semiotics) (sémiologie)The study of signs and the laws governing how they function, to which structural linguistics leads.Hear Shore introduce it · L19 30:41 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 19

L19

signifier and signified (signifiant / signifié)The two faces of a linguistic sign: the sound-image that signifies and the concept signified; together they form the sign.Hear Shore introduce it · L19 16:03 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 19

slave moralityNietzsche's name for a morality in which the weak brand their masters evil, call themselves good, and turn weakness and suffering into virtue, promising reward in the world to come.Hear Shore introduce it · L6 36:05 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 6

social perfectibilityThe Enlightenment idea that we can know, control and reshape the world, and people, toward perfection.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 6:11 ↗

L18

socialism with a human faceSlogan of Alexander Dubček's 1968 reform in Czechoslovakia: Communist rule with freer speech, rehabilitated purge victims and a mix of planning and market. In the lecture, a humanist "third way" crushed by Warsaw Pact tanks.Hear Shore introduce it · L18 48:14 ↗

L3, L17

the soul of the nationHerder's idea that nations, like individuals, possess a unique, irreducible collective identity, expressed above all through their shared language.Hear Shore introduce it · L3 42:07 ↗

spatialization of timeTreating time on the model of space, as divisible units (seconds, instants) laid out side by side; for Bergson a category mistake.Hear Shore introduce it · L7 12:40 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 7

specter (vs. Geist)The Manifesto's opening "specter" is a different word from Hegel's Geist, and unlike a ghost of the past, it is a ghost from the future.Hear Shore introduce it · L5 37:00 ↗

L17

sphere of ownness (Eigenheitssphäre) (Eigenheit / Eigenheitssphäre)Husserl's name for what remains once the reduction leaves only what is given as one's own, with other selves bracketed.Hear Shore introduce it · L17 10:44 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 17

L2, L9, L19

state of nature v. state of cultureThe imagined pre-political condition of humanity (violent, free, or virtuous depending on the thinker) contrasted with organized civil society.Hear Shore introduce it · L2 18:34 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 2

L19

structural analysis of mythReading myths as variations on limited themes governed by an underlying grammar, comparable to language, that classifies experience and eases social contradictions.Hear Shore introduce it · L19 44:33 ↗

L4, L9, L10, L11

sublation (aufheben / Aufhebung) (aufheben (verb) / Aufhebung (noun))To negate and preserve at once, lifting something to a higher level; loosely rendered as "sublate," "supersede," or "overcome."Hear Shore introduce it · L4 35:40 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 4

the superego (das Über-Ich)Conscience, not consciousness: society internalized as a voice that condemns the self's desires and generates guilt.Shore's image. Shore hears the über- prefix as in Übermensch: that which stands over and above the I.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 32:25 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 9

L15

superfluousness (superfluous people)The condition in which human beings are made expendable, through statelessness or atomized conformity; Arendt ties it to the emergence of radical evil.Hear Shore introduce it · L15 34:46 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 15

L25

surplus of meaningDerrida's reversal of the charge of meaninglessness: without a fixed center, signification overflows instead of vanishing.Hear Shore introduce it · L25 33:23 ↗

L19

synchrony vs. diachrony (synchronie / diachronie)Synchronic analysis studies a language as a system at one moment; diachronic analysis studies its change over time. Saussure treats them as distinct fields.Shore's image. Diachrony is a vertical axis of time; synchrony is a horizontal plane of simultaneity.Hear Shore introduce it · L19 21:45 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 19

T

L4, L6, L7, L19

telosThe end or goal a thing is already developing toward, e.g. the seed is "aiming" at the apple it will become.Shore's image. The apple seed contains no apple yet but will never become a pineapple: the eventual apple is pre-programmed into it.Hear Shore introduce it · L4 35:02 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 4

L11

the things themselves (die Sachen selbst) (Zu den Sachen selbst!)Husserl's replacement for Kant's unreachable thing-in-itself: the real things are objects as they appear and are given in experience.Hear Shore introduce it · L11 41:58 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 11

L12

thrownness (Geworfenheit)Dasein finds itself already cast into a time, place and situation it did not choose, with no vantage point before or outside it.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 31:33 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 12

too much history (historical sickness)Excessive awareness of the past overwhelms and paralyzes; only those with great "plastic power" can bear a lot of history. Hegel's world-process is the target.Hear Shore introduce it · L6 26:26 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 6

totalitarianismAs Shore defines it: a regime with draconian ideology and absolute truth-claims, a messianic movement, institutions of terror, monopolies on communication and force, a panopticon state, and erased public/private line.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 5:17 ↗

L22

traceThe residue of other possible meanings within a signifier: neither fully present nor fully absent, yet something the signifier's own meaning may rely on.Hear Shore introduce it · L22 37:20 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 22

L11, L12

transcendental ego vs. empirical ego (transzendentales Ich / empirisches Ich)The empirical ego is the contingent, worldly self with its own history. The transcendental ego is the pure subject left after the epoché, the source of all sense the world has for me. In the lecture, a universal "I-ness" in everyone.Shore's image. Like H2O beneath tap, bottled and sea water that all taste different; or the ideal "appleness" beneath lopsided, brown-spotted individual apples.Hear Shore introduce it · L11 34:29 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 11

L22

transcendental signified (signifié transcendantal)A meaning outside the play of signs that would anchor all the rest; in Derrida's argument a stand-in for God or any unifying first principle.Hear Shore introduce it · L22 28:22 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 22

L11

transcendental vs. transcendent (and immanent) (transzendental / transzendent / immanent)Immanent means inside consciousness; transcendent, outside it. Kant's transcendental means the conditions that make knowledge of objects possible, a usage Husserl adapts; Kant's transcendent means beyond possible experience.Hear Shore introduce it · L11 26:14 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 11

L4, L7, L9

transformation of quantity into qualityGradual quantitative changes accumulate until, at a threshold, they trigger a sudden change in kind rather than degree.Shore's image. Water warmed degree by degree seems unchanged until it hits the boiling point, when it suddenly becomes steam — quantity flipping into quality.Hear Shore introduce it · L4 16:53 ↗

L13

translucency of consciousness (translucidité de la conscience)Sartre's view that consciousness is wholly present to itself, with no hidden unconscious, against Freud. In the lecture, consciousness is "neither opaque nor transparent."Hear Shore introduce it · L13 44:04 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 13

L20

triangular model of desire (model/mediator)Desire runs between a subject and a model or mediator; the object at the third corner is secondary.Shore's image. She draws it as a triangle on the board: object at the top, subject and mediator below.Hear Shore introduce it · L20 21:37 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 20

U

ÜbermenschZarathustra's prophesied future human who overcomes present humanity and its mediocrity; humanity is only a bridge to it. Nobody in the book actually is one.Shore's image. Says the Übermensch is like an aufheben of the human being, and that no English rendering (superman, overman) works, so leave it untranslated.Hear Shore introduce it · L6 38:14 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 6

L12

uncanniness / not-at-homeness (Unheimlichkeit)The feeling of not being at home in the world that anxiety brings, since finite existence has no secure ground.Shore's image. Freud, too, liked this word; Shore stresses that the literal sense is not-being-at-home.Hear Shore introduce it · L12 42:50 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 12

L9, L19

the unconscious (das Unbewusste)For Freud, most of mental life: repressed wishes and memories that drive thought, feeling and symptoms while staying outside awareness; consciousness is only a fleeting surface.Shore's image. Paul Robinson's dark closet: whatever the conscious mind finds too disturbing gets shoved inside, so the closet keeps filling and nothing ever leaves.Hear Shore introduce it · L9 22:57 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 9

L22

under erasure (sous rature)Writing a word while crossing it out, to keep using it yet signal that it is inadequate.Shore's image. Like colloquial scare quotes: you use the word but do not fully commit to it, having your cake and eating it.Hear Shore introduce it · L22 39:27 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 22

V

vanguard (vanguard party)Lenin's organized core of professional revolutionaries, who bring class consciousness to workers he thought too slow to reach it unaided.Hear Shore introduce it · L8 22:43 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 8

L11

view from nowhere / Archimedean pointThe ideal of a fully objective observer outside all perspectives, which phenomenology sees as the fantasy of natural-scientific objectivism.Shore's image. The "fly on the wall" who can observe completely objectively.Hear Shore introduce it · L11 13:57 ↗

L24

Volk (people, folk, nation)A people imagined as one collective and bearer of a historical destiny; the sense in which Heidegger's 1933 address uses it.Hear Shore introduce it · L24 21:33 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 24

W

L4, L6, L8, L19

the whole / totality (Das Wahre ist das Ganze)Nothing has meaning taken in isolation; only the interconnected whole, graspable only from its end, yields truth.Hear Shore introduce it · L4 46:56 ↗ · On the handout for lectures 4, 8

L10

the word as such (slovo kak takovoe) (слово как таковое)Russian futurist idea that words sever from referents and become self-valuing things, making form everything.Shore's image. Freed words become toys you can do anything with.Hear Shore introduce it · L10 25:23 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 10

L10

words in freedom (parole in libertà) (parole-in-libertà)Marinetti's program of liberating words from syntax, punctuation and grammar; also typeface and layout play.Hear Shore introduce it · L10 23:15 ↗ · On the handout for lecture 10

L11

the world as horizonFor Husserl there is a single world, the widest context in which objects appear; differing perspectives on an object do not make objective knowledge impossible.Hear Shore introduce it · L11 32:19 ↗