Ype De Boer

Biography

My philosophical interests are contemporary philosophy, historicity and the relation between philosophy and literature, and I try to interweave these interests in my teaching as well as in my research. My lectures stress the way the understanding of philosophy, art and language has changed throughout history and what this insight means for contemporary philosophy. My PhD research deals with Giorgio Agamben’s methodology and his conception of subjectivity, i.e. human thinking, experiencing and acting. For Agamben, subjectivity is constituted in and through language, and, since language is essentially historical, so is the constitution of subjectivity. From this basis Agamben analyses the Western tradition in order to grasp the way our present experience is constituted by categories such as ‘life’, ‘law’ and ‘human’ and theoretical pairs such as ‘potentiality-actuality’, ‘necessity-contingency’ and ‘general-particular’. These analyses, in which Agamben engages himself with disciplines outside of philosophy such as law theory, political theory, comparative literature and theology, are all part of the major task he has set for philosophy: a revision of the fundamental categories of the social sciences. My PhD research consists of an analysis of the philosophical presuppositions that make his method of ‘philosophical archaeology’ possible, in order to give an account of the way this method has developed and changed throughout his oeuvre and how the specific results of his engagement with tradition are to be evaluated. The guiding concept in my analysis is Agamben's 'zone of indifference'.

Research Interest

As a separate project I have written a book on the philosophical value of the literary images in the fiction of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. My thesis is that an analysis of the images, persona's and narratives in his writing offers an important perspective on problems in modern Western secular life. Vice versa is it starting from contemporary philosophical issues that a genuine and coherent interpretation of Murukami's fictional oeuvre is strived for.