Boredom and Repetition

Human life is filled with repetition. Most obviously, we need to eat, drink, and sleep, to urinate and defecate, at regular intervals, and for our entire lives. Recent advances in technology, and changes to the organization -- especially the division -- of labor in the modern economy have only added new kinds of repetition, particularly in what we now call our "working lives.'' These changes have arguably only intensified a necessary feature of human life, indeed, of living as such. But this intensification has arguably also given rise to something new: an experience of profound boredom -- an experience, though, not of having nothing to do (as when a child complains of being bored), but of having, rather, to do (anymore, again) at all. This course is an investigation of the relation between repetition and the experience of (this peculiar kind of) boredom. Readings will be drawn from both philosophy and literature, and may include Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace.