We start with a scene of disease, and the corruption is connected to a crisis of transmission in the figure of the father. “The three plays we discuss”- Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame-“have a corrupt world in crisis. “We have this question of maintenance, of how the world continues,” says Kimhi. Oedipus fulfills a prophecy whereby he kills his father, beds his mother, and unwittingly brings disaster to his city, Thebes. Oedipus Rex, says Kimhi, sets up the question of the father as a crisis of succession. “It has to do with the unconscious question being asked: What is the father? Who is the father?” “There’s an intimate relation between psychoanalysis and this play,” says Kimhi, who speaks in a stentorian tone with a thick Israeli accent and an unhurried cadence. Kimhi arrives just as the clock hits 1:30 and wastes no time jumping into the deep end: Sigmund Freud’s reading of Oedipus Rex, which pioneered the idea of the Oedipus complex (the child’s repressed sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex). It’s the fourth week of spring quarter and everybody looks comfortable several students have brought lunch or sip coffee.
This is a comparative literature class, a philosophy class, and a Committee on Social Thought class, and I recognize fellow English majors besides. When I arrive at the fifth-floor classroom in Foster Hall on a Tuesday in April, I find a diverse group of about 15 undergraduates, a few missing among 19 enrolled. He has broad expertise: in two years at UChicago, after stops at Yale and Tel Aviv University, he’s taught Martin Heidegger, Hamlet, psychoanalysis, and the analytic philosopher Gottlob Frege.
His research connects logic and the philosophy of language to questions in metaphysics and psychoanalysis. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the College, is famous in modern philosophical circles for his Thinking and Being: A Two Way Capacity-a book forthcoming from Harvard University Press but long in circulation in the form of drafts and lecture notes passed among colleagues and former students. Kimhi, an associate professor in the John U. Last year Irad Kimhi’s undergraduate Unhappiness course, according to a friend who was enrolled, attracted tenured philosophy professors, graduate students, and auditors who filled the lecture hall to bursting.
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