Aesthetics & Politics: A Theory Course

UG - Undergraduate

What do we mean by "aesthetics and politics," that vaguely defined field of research, knowledge, and understanding? As we know thanks to the Gestalt theory, the whole is always more than the sum of the parts; it is not to be found in the elements, the key is their relationship. So, let us start with a deceptively simple question: what does "and" mean? Is "and" standing for "of"? Are we thus thinking about the aesthetics of politics? Or does it stand for "in", as in the aesthetics in politics? Are we considering the possibility of an aesthetics thus politics, as in a politics that is always already aesthetic? Or are we asserting instead an aesthetics yet or unlike politics, as if the relation were somehow an exception to some rule of exclusion? These different, overlapping, disjointed, reversible articulations between aesthetics and politics, in their chaos of multiplicity, do somehow contribute to the formulation of some kind of cosmos: art is political first and foremost because it is one of the fundamental ways in which society folds itself, sees, transforms, stages, and makes sense of itself. And that is why both art and politics rightfully deserve to be called both "political" and "aesthetic": because in dealing with aisthesis, with the sensible and the perceptible, and with the in-between of multiple and multi-perspectival sensing bodies, they jointly deal with the shared world of intercorporeal meanings, practices, institutions, and power that we call "the political." The course will focus on four twentieth century authors and their aesthetico-political understanding of the notions of cosmos, power, truth, and freedom: Argentine fiction writer and essayist Jorge Luis Borges, French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jewish-German American political thinker Hannah Arendt, and American neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty. During the semester, we will also watch and analyze four films in some way associated with the work of the discussed authors: Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's Performance, Matsumoto Toshio's Funeral Parade of Roses, Eyal Sivan and Rony Brauman's The Specialist, and Errol Morris' The Unknown Known.