R. Seminar on the Aesthetics of Politics

In this year's edition of the Research Seminar on
the Aesthetics of Politics we will engage in an in
-depth reading of two different but deeply
intertwined aesthetico-political authors: French
philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
Jewish-German American political thinker Hannah
Arendt. We will devote one week to each author and
each of the weeks could be taken separately as
individual seminars as well as both together as a
single course. The strategy we will follow will
reverse the usual expectations regarding these
thinkers. In the case of Merleau-Ponty, a
passionately involved left-wing aesthetic
philosopher, we will analyze the way in which it
was in fact his aesthetic and most philosophical
writings rather than the strictly political ones
those that give us the most profound understanding
of political life. The Visible and the Invisible
is the title of Merleau-Ponty's famous,
unfinished, and posthumously published
masterpiece. Although Merleau-Ponty's early
phenomenology of perception and his essays on art,
politics, and language already showed an affinity
between the aesthetic phenomena of expression and
style, and the political and cultural dynamics of
society at large, it was his late notion of flesh
that became crucial for grounding what this
seminar assumes to be his aesthetico-political
understanding of politics, revolution, and
democracy. Inversely, Arendt is no doubt one of
the most important and influential strictly
political thinkers. Surprisingly though, it was
also in the past years of her prolific life and
production that she chose to interrogate Kant's
notion of aesthetic judgment as a means to better
understand our contemporary political world. The
second week of this Wintersession course will thus
move to perform an in-depth reading of Arendt's
key aesthetico-political writings.