Sometimes I waste time by thinking of classes that I will never get a chance to teach, classes that would be for graduate students (which we do not have at USM), or entail books which have yet to be translated, or classes that are just too long. One class that meets all three would be a class on the dialectic and vicissitudes, this class would focus on the attempt to to rethink that dialectic in twentieth century philosophy, texts would include Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, Adorno's Negative Dialectics, Althusser's For Marx, Badiou's Theory of the Subject. That would just be the big ones. Of course it would help if this class was preceded by one on Hegel and Marx, and perhaps followed by a class on Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida (to name a few). At this point it has become completely unmanageable. I have long since come to the conclusion that what is often presented as the conflict between postmodernism and Marxism, or whatever you'd like to call it, is perhaps best understood as a division between those who maintain the dialectic, with some changes, and those who depart from it.
