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.