Jacques Derrida, drawing on his Jewish heritage, reimagines hospitality through the image of Abraham’s tent - open on all sides. To welcome the stranger, he shows, is never secure or comfortable: it means opening one’s home, and even oneself, to something unpredictable and unknown.
Gilles Deleuze’s idea of micropolitics shifts attention from institutional politics to everyday life. Inspired by Kafka’s Jewish experience, he shows how small gestures, tones, and habits can become quiet acts of renewal. Micropolitics invites us to recognise how new political and ethical possibilities emerge in the texture of daily existence, creating openings for different ways of relating, imagining, and living together.
Throughout the session, we’ll read short texts, explore their links with Jewish thought, and discuss how these ideas speak to current issues of identity, community and coexistence.
What You’ll Learn:
- Understand how philosophy can impact & shape everyday life
- Learn how to analyse & critique texts
- Develop an understanding of Jewish thought and identity
Who It’s For:
This course is for anyone who believes in the power of change, possibility and hope. If you’re interested in meaningful discussion and want to understand how Jewish thought & philosophy provides guidance to personal and societal change, this course offers an important place to start.
Who Delivers It?
Daniel Weizman is a philosophy lecturer at City Lit and the Mary Ward Centre in London, and the founder of the London School of Continental Philosophy. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), with a focus on philosopher Gilles Deleuze. His teaching spans twentieth- and twenty-first-century continental philosophy, including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek, with connections to politics, culture, and aesthetics.
What will we cover?
- Contemporary Philosophy and Jewish Thought
We open by exploring how Jewish ideas of exile, responsibility, and justice have shaped modern thought. From Walter Benjmain, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and non-Jewish thinkers, we’ll explore how contemporary philosophy delves into themes of identity, relations, community and minority.
- Welcoming the Stranger: Derrida and Hospitality
Derrida turns the story of Abraham into a philosophy of hospitality - welcoming the stranger without condition. We’ll read from Of Hospitality and Abraham, the Other to consider how openness, fear, and responsibility intertwine.
- Everyday Revolutions: Deleuze and Micropolitics
For Deleuze, change begins not with institutions but with the smallest shifts in perception and relationships. Through his text Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, we’ll explore how creativity and resistance can emerge from the margins.
About | The London School of Continental Philosophy
