Aesthetics of Politics

Research 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:
Argentine fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges and
French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The
strategy we will follow will reverse the usual
expectations regarding these thinkers. In the case
of Borges, an author widely but wrongly regarded
as "a-political", we will reveal the way in which
his "fictions" were in fact a massive attempt to
respond to the politics of his time-the advent of
fascism and totalitarianism-and thus will help us
interrogate "the political" in its most complex
manifestations: the question of political forms,
the question of the institution of the new in
historical time, and the question of alterity. In
the case of Merleau-Ponty, a passionately involved
left-wing political thinker, we will analyze the
way in which it was in fact his aesthetic and most
philosophical writings rather than the strictly
politi al ones those that might give us the most
profound understanding of political life. The
first week of the seminar will offer a
multilayered political reading of Borges' fiction
and non-fiction writings. As we just said,
although he was not a "political" writer in the
conventional sense of the word, his texts
constantly engaged in the indirect interrogation
of our shared, political world. Our first approach
to his writings will be concerned with his
non-fiction critique of Nazism and Fascism in
Europe and Latin America. During the following
sessions, we will structure the course as an
exploration of the theoretical implications of
Borges' "detour of fiction," and we will do so by
diving into three conceptual aesthetico-political
dichotomies that his writings will help us
interrogate: that of chaos and cosmos, the
imaginary and the real, and the same and the
Other. Although Merleau-Ponty's early
phenomenology of perception and his essays on art,
politics, and language already showed an affinity
between the aes hetic 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 course
assumes to be his aesthetico-political
understanding of politics, revolution, and
democracy