Thinking the Aesthetic
Description
This seminar explores aesthetics as a challenge for thought that has been taken up in recent decades by continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and feminism. Theories of the subject, theories of the event, theories of affect, and of course theories of art have come to organize themselves as arenas for working through various reconceptualizations of the body, perception, affect, and sense/meaning – as well as whatever may be figured as existing at or beyond the limit of these things.
This seminar invites interdisciplinary paper proposals under this broad agenda.
Questions posed might include something like the following:
What is the distinctive role of the body, perception, or sensation in the context of aesthetics? Since art is always sensory and material, how should we understand the relation between aesthetic perception and meaning? How should we conceive the relation between art and society – as disruptive? as dialectical? as an "event?" as "critique"? How are canonical models of aesthetics (Plato, Kant, Hegel, Freud, Heidegger) challenged by the work of more recent thinkers? How do we think about the production of affect generated in the event of art – about aesthetic pleasure, unsettlement, tedium, or exhaustion? Insofar as aesthetics and sexuality are organizations of bodies and pleasures, forms and identities, fantasies and ideals and their deformations and deconstructions – how might we approach the dialogue between theories of aesthetics and theories of sexuality?
Reference to concrete works of art and literature are very much welcome, indeed encouraged, in all papers, but accepted proposals will foreground the theoretical contribution of the proposed paper.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Thomas Brockelman is Professor of Philosophy at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. He is the author of The Frame and the Mirror: On Collage and the Postmodern (Northwestern University Press, 2001); Žižek and Heidegger: The Question Concerning Techno-Capitalism (Continuum Press, 2009),; as well as numerous articles in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. His present work examines philosophical links between existential and psychoanalytic traditions.
Speaker Bio
Ian Balfour is Professor Emeritus of English and of Social & Political Thought at York University. He has written The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy and Northrop Frye. He co-edited with Atom Egoyan, Subtitles: On the Foreigness of Film and has published essays on Kiarostami and Jean-Luc-Nancy, on James Balwin’s film criticism, and on adaptations of Austen’s Emma. He has edited collections on human rights, on Derrida, and on Benjamin. He's finishing The Moment of the Sublime.
Speaker Bio
Megan Hirner is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, where her research is at the intersection of psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and 20th century literature. Her forthcoming dissertation project, Some Failed Harmony: Toward a Feminine Aesthetics of Literature, explores how femininity facilitates the transmission of unconscious wounds in the space of literature.
Speaker Bio
Charles Shepherdson is Professor of English at the State University of New York at Albany. He is the author of Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (Routledge), Lacan and the Limits of Language (Fordham), and Lacan and Philosophy (forthcoming). He is working on a book on Sophocles' Antigone, and a project called Aesthetics and Emotion: A Genealogy, which explores the distinctive character of emotion in aesthetic experience, as distinct from social and philosophical accounts.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Robert Hughes is a scholar of comparative literature, working at the intersection of contemporary continental philosophies of art and aesthetics and feminist and phenomenological theories of the body. He is also a translator of contemporary philosophy from French and German into English and a co-director of the International Philosophical Seminar in Italy. His current project is a translation of Peter Sloterdijk's recent book on Europe, The Continent Without Qualities.
Speaker Bio
Valerio Amoretti is an Assistant Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, and core faculty member of the Literature and Mind research center. He studied chemistry and neuroscience as an undergraduate, obtained an MSc in Psychoanalytic Psychology from the Anna Freud Center (London), an MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature (York) and a PhD in English and Comparative Literature (Columbia University). In 2020-23 he was a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University.
Speaker Bio
Dr. François-Nicolas Vozel is an assistant professor of French at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research takes place at the intersection of deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and ecological Marxism. He has published essays on Cixous, Duras, Beckett, Musil, Derrida, Proust, Freud, Bataille, and Blanchot. He is currently finishing a book manuscript on Cixous and Heidegger titled The Art of Innocence: Cixous, Heidegger, and the Poetics of the Event.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Nathan Gorelick is Term Assistant Professor of English at Barnard College. Previously, he was Associate Professor of English at Utah Valley University. He is the author of The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious (Northwestern UP, 2024).
Speaker Bio
Urvi Vora is a PhD candidate and Presidential Fellow in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, broadly working on aesthetics and psychoanalysis. Her critical and creative writing has appeared in Contact Quarterly, Critical Collective, Indent: The Body and The Performative, Steaua, and LURU magazine.