Aesthetics and the Senses

The event of art, Jacques Rancière writes, plays out in “form, a burst of colour, an acceleration of rhythm, a pause between words, a movement, or a glimmering surface.” Art, in other words, transforms the “sensible fabric” of life “at the cost of constantly merging its own reasons with those belonging to other spheres of experience.”

This course will put Rancière’s assertion to the test, examining the ways in which theories of the aesthetic have shaped and been shaped by the historical sensorium, resisted and embraced different models of the senses and their associated faculties. Does aesthetic experience forge a space apart from history and matter or, as Rancière argues, is it intimately entwined with temporal conditions and perceptual mechanisms? This course, an introduction to philosophical aesthetics, centers on the lines of inquiry that arise from this question and its corollaries.

The eighteenth century reinvented aesthetics—the study of beauty, taste, and the nature of art—from the classical notion of aisthesis (sense or perception), in search of a science of feeling to correspond to enlightenment theories of reason. Concentrating on three traditions of aesthetic theory, the German, the French, and the Anglo-American, this course considers deeply-rooted critical suspicions about the uses of the aesthetic. It also takes up some or all of the following questions: Does aesthetic experience exist? If so, how do bodily pleasure and pain inform it? How do aesthetic categories matter, if at all? What does it mean to conceive of a politics or an ethics of aesthetics? Objects of study and experiment are likely to include Kant, Hegel, Adorno, Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Levinas, Rancière, Ngai, and Sedgwick.

Course Schedule

Monday, 6:30-9:30pm EST
October 19 — November 09, 2020
4 weeks

$315.00

Registration Closed

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