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woodLPhilip Wood

Associate Professor
Ph.D., Yale University

Office: Rayzor Hall 212
Office Hours: Wednesday 4:00-5:00pm
Phone: 713-348-2618
E-mail: prw@rice.edu

 

 

Areas of Research/Interest:

How do we articulate what we have learned in recent decades from a "cultural constructionism" of subjectivity and literary canons with aesthetic ecstasy (both the "old" and the "new" aestheticism)?  Deleuze's and Derrida's notions of a "dissolved cogito" and "non-egological" consciousness in the context of aesthetic ecstasy.   More generally, in what might life "after the subject" consist?  A reevaluation of both the continuities and apparent standoff between phenomenology -- Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Michel Henry -- and poststructuralism.  I.e., possible revisionary versions of the dominant account of French thought from existentialism to the present.   For example, were the French poststructuralists really ever the "constructionists" (still less the "cultural" constructionists) they have been claimed to be?  Distinguishing between constructionism's lasting contributions and its simultaneous unwitting complicity with the domination of all life-forms by global capitalism. 

 

Fall 2009 Courses

FREN 407 - Introduction to Cinema in French

FREN 589 - French Theory From Saussure to Irigaray, Part I

Representative Publications

  • From Existentialism to Poststructuralism and the Coming of the Postindustrial Age, Stanford University Press (in progress).
  • "Beyond the Simulacrum of Religion versus Secularism: Modernist Aesthetic 'Mysticism'; Or, Why We Will Not Stop Revering 'Great Books'" (Religion and Literature, Spring 2005, 93-117).
  • Terror and Consensus, co-edited with Jean-Joseph Goux, Stanford University Press, 1998.
  • Understanding Sartre, University of South Carolina, 1990.
  • "'Democracy' and 'Totalitarianism' in Contemporary French Thought, the 'Death' of the Subject, The Heidegger Scandal and Ethics in Postructuralism," in Jean-Joseph Goux and Philip Wood (eds.) Terror and Consensus: Vicissitudes of French Thought, Stanford University Press, 1998.
  • "A Revisionary Account of the Apotheosis and Demise of the Philosophy of the Subject: Hegel, Sartre, Heidegger, Structuralism and Postructuralism," in (ed.) Dennis Minahen Sartre Revisited, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.