220056 The End of History (And What Came After) (S) (SoSe 2017)

The seminar intends to discuss one of the major intellectual themes of postwar (Western) societies: the end of history. The discussion will proceed along three distinctive steps. In the first step, we are going to have a look at the birth of the modern Western concept of history and explore its characteristic. In the second step, we are going to have a look at its supposed end. Here we are going to dive into the postwar skepticism toward the idea of history and into the various “end of history” theories of the last more than half a century. Finally, in the third step, we are going to entertain the idea that change over time in human affairs still takes place, and discuss whether change over time today has anything to do with history as we came to know it in modernity. The language of the seminar is English.

Following our first brief meeting in April, we will have two blocks of discussion, each consisting of two days (meaning four occasions altogether). For each day I selected 3-4 readings revolving around a central theme. In the first meeting we are going to discuss the concept of history; in the second we approach the "end of history" theme with Fukuyama (and Derrida's critique of Fukuyama), which means ending history with a triumphal fulfilment; in the third we review some more skeptical "end of history" versions which put an end to history in the sense of a movement and directionality; and in the final meeting we will have a look at how technology bursts into this picture and challenges both the modern concept of history and "end of history" theories.

No doubt that there are many other approaches to the "end of history" theme, just as there are many other related themes, like the end of ideology and utopia, or the idea that we live in a presentist age. We may touch upon them in the discussion, but all of them cannot feature on the reading list of a blockseminar. As to the reading list that tries to keep focus, see below the preliminary version.

Bibliography

May 19: History

• Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge, 1991), 41–53.
• Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago, 1949), 1–19; and 52–59.
• Hannah Arendt, “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,” In Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York, 1961), 41–90.
• Reinhart Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae: The dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process,” In Futures Past (New York, 2004), 26–42.

May 20: The End of History Part I. – The Fukuyama Way

• Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, No. 16 (Summer 1989), 3-18.
• Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992), xi–xxiii; 55–70; 126–130; 211–222; 287–299.
• Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York, 1994) 61–95.

June 9: The End of History Part II. – The “Postmodern” Way

• Gianni Vattimo, “The End of (Hi)story,” Chicago Review, Vol. 35, No. 4 (1987), 20–30.
• Judith Butler, “Poststructuralism and Postmarxism,” Diacritics, vol. 23, no. 4 (1993), 3–11.
• Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion. (New York, 2000), 31–57.
• Keith Jenkins, Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (London, 1999), 1–24.

June 10: And What Came After

• Nick Bostrom, ‘Why I Want to be a Posthuman when I Grow Up,’ in Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity (Dordrecht, 2008), 107–136.
• Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York, 2002), xi – xiii, 3–17.
• Vernor Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” in Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace, 1993, 11–22.
• Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, “History Begins in the Future: On Historical Sensibility in the Age of Technology,” in The Ethos of History: Time and Responsibility, eds. Jayne Svenungsson and Stefan Helgesson (New York, forthcoming in 2017).