Open to MA in Aesthetics and Politics students and MFA students only.
CS721: Contemporary Aesthetic Theory
Instructor: Arne De Boever
This course explores the aesthetic legacy of G.W.F. Hegel’s master/slave-dialectic in post-World War II continental thought. What would it mean to read the master/slave-dialectic, generally understood to be a political narrative, as a theory of aesthetics? What new perspectives on art, spectatorship, and artistic production might this open up? Starting from Hegel’s influence on Emmanuel Levinas (Totality and Infinity; Otherwise Than Being), and moving through the work of Jacques Derrida (The Animal that Therefore I Am), Gilles Deleuze (Francis Bacon), and Giorgio Agamben (Nudities), the first part of the course studies the importance of the face and the animal in contemporary aesthetic theory. Through close-readings of Hegel’s legacy in the work of Jean-François Lyotard (The Inhuman), Jean Baudrillard (The Vital Illusion), and in feminist thought of Donna Haraway (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women) and Catherine Malabou (What Should We Do With Our Brain?), the second part of the course explores aesthetic theory’s turn towards technology and the posthuman. In a final workshop, the course returns to Hegel by considering the so-called “educational turn” (Irit Rogoff) in aesthetic thought. What is the relevance of the master/slave-dialectic for one’s understanding of aesthetic education today, in a time of political and economic crisis?
