While the figure of the double or doppelgänger has fascinated literature since its diverse beginnings, Naomi Klein’s 2023 Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World showed how the figure’s haunting qualities can explain some of our more imperative ethical and political conundrums at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. From the Manichean configurations of a bipartisan politics and its underlying ontotheology with an impermeable good v. evil divide, up to the misogynistic dreams of a male “parthenogenesis” where men just reproduce themselves without female or queer difference, the specter of the good or evil but ultimately always uncanny double is wildly spread across our cultures. As Klein showed, the public’s confusion between two similar yet very different writers sharing a first name (herself and Naomi Wolf) in the age of social media bespeak not only our contemporary overload of information but also a hermeneutic space where we project and double into figures and discourses with whom we identify or against which we define ourselves. 

In this seminar we want to explore such contemporary doublings and their relations to literary, cinematic, and artistic products, as well as to philosophical, anthropological, medical, and other discourses and practices. From classic representations like Dostoyevsky’s The Double, films like Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, or whole projects like David Lynch’s doppelganger and mirror world rich oeuvre, through phenomenological approaches to the experience of being “doubled” or “replicated” in social media and/or public life, or of being a twin sibling, up to the ontotheologico-political projections concerned with an evil mirror world and with the pure replication sans other or otherness, we hope to engage in a rich dialogue in which we discover the shape of the fascination that such figures and self-figuring have in our current zeitgeist.