Philosophy of Possibilities and Jewish Thought Today [In Building]

Wednesdays, 7pm-9pm, hybrid // £20 per session, £72 for the course // How can Jewish ideas of hospitality, minority and community help us imagine a more open politics today? This course explores how three major philosophers - Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Luc Nancy - rethink belonging, difference, and life in common. We will also discuss how their ideas resonate with, and challenge, Jewish ideas about exile and coexistence. 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 - openings for new political and ethical spaces. Jean-Luc Nancy invites us to see community not as unity or shared identity, but as shared fragility - a being-together that is always incomplete and always evolving. Across four sessions, we’ll read short texts, explore their links with Jewish thought, and discuss how these ideas speak to current issues of migration, identity, and coexistence.