So I’ll just second the motion—and underscore it—to include the Adorno and Horkheimer piece. That thing rocks.

For instance: the Searle/Derrida debates in Glyph, starting with your own paraphrase of SEC (not the essay itself, yet), then Searle’s understandable and naive objections, then finishing off with Derrida setting things straight in Limited, Inc.

From another tack: Give ‘em appropriate excerpts from Marx (Capital), the Althusser, then Foucault.

Habermas… eh, ok, but as an “answer” to Foucault, there’s no point.

Likewise: selections from Freud’s Oedipus stuff, then Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.

Cixous for a version of continental feminism (no prior prep should be needed)

Zizek…? Joking, yes?

The closest you should come to Zizek is: forget Zizek. Just read Lacan’s lectures on Poe, then Derrida’s “Purveyor of Truth”. (too bad big D is dead; Zizek’s bloating corpus could really, really use a derridean scalpel)

Or not.

I fully agree that History of the Concept of Time is easier, but I was suggesting Fundamental Concepts because of Heidegger’s different conception of philosophy as attunement, as opposed to worldview creation or as a science. I wouldn’t suggest the entire thing in an introductory course, but I think the first part is useful for showing other ‘styles’ of philosophy than the current analytic view or the widerange misunderstandings of continental/postmodern thought.

“’m an analytic, but I team-taught a course last year with Aspazia from Mad Melancholic Feminista tracing the history of the analytic/continental divide”

Is the syllabus for this online? I’d love to see it.

Incidentally, when I was being trained in ‘Religious Studies,’ Gadamer’s Truth and Method was all-the-rage (along with anything by Ricoeur) prompting me to cultivate a fondness (yes, it’s possible) for Habermas. Indeed, I tried to defend his reading of Freud from Grunbaum’s rather positivistic attack in The Foundations of Psychoanalysis… (Grunbaum took on several leading lights there) in a seminar paper which I’ve since lost. One consequence of all this was a further and deeper immersion in the Freudian stuff, especially the neo-Freudian and Kleinian/neo-Kleinian literature (while Habermas himself seemed to have lost all interest), and if only for that reason I’m grateful Grunbaum stirred things up. No doubt my own hermeneutic skills have proven insufficient when it comes to the likes of Lacan, meaning Zizek has remained rather opaque for me, although I’ll concede he’s quite a clever fellow. I get a little dizzy from (intimidated by?) all the intellectual acrobatics and not a few unfamiliar references (I suppose in some measure I remain culturally illiterate). And on top of all that I could be dim-witted and impatient….

I’m not above wondering if there’s a bit too much fawning over the latest French intellectual fashions. And perhaps there’s a generation gap here too (at least in my case). So, at the end of the day, I’m ‘reading’ (i.e., preferring, enjoying) Sartre or Beauvoir or Habermas, while others are reading Lyotard and Lacan, Deleuze and Zizek.

That’s just the kind of vapid, trivially obvious sentiment dressed up in needlessly convoluted meaningless jargon I’d expect from a deconstructivist Lacanian postmodernist relativist like you.

The problem here
    is that
      Recent Continental Philosophy
       does not

         make

       any sense

    at

  all

…
  

But as you can tell I don’t have a background in this stuff. I wouldn’t discount the idea of sticking to primary texts, even complicated ones (e.g. ecw’s class, which sounds good). My fave actual Continentals are Deleuze (maybe Bergsonism, or D/G’s “Rhizome” in Mille Plateaux) and Gadamer (he and Habermas have a quick back and forth at one point: see Brice Wachterhauser, ed., Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy, an excellent collection). But I’m a bit (or more) behind the times by now, I imagine, as my exemplars seem to be dead.

He’s in an undefined cultural zone—mostly Chinese, sort of British, somewhat Muslim (but with Hindu-Buddhist highlights), and not really that far from some of the world’s few remaining cannibals.

Singapore isn’t even the Other, because no one cares. It’s more like the Semi or the Non or the Huh?

Of course, the Singaporian combination of technical efficiency and free markets, with managed democracy, minimal civil liberties, and minimal political participation is the wave of the future. You heard it here first.