Philosophy / Aesthetics

Teacher: Caroline Godart

This course will focus on philosophical texts which, in their reflections on different artistic forms (literature, visual arts, cinema, dance, performance, etc.), bring out unsuspected forces, too often silenced or masked in Western culture, such as the becoming, the obscure, the feminine, the queer, the Relation, the archipelago, the drunkenness, the haptics, the chaos, the poetry, the intuition, the unconscious or even the unpredictable. We will see together in what ways these powerful concepts can feed a thought on art that seeks less to evaluate than to encounter and feel.

We will read authors like Audre Lorde, Judith Butler, Édouard Glissant, Ursula Le Guin, José Esteban Munoz, Elizabeth Grosz, Emma Bigé, Hélène Cixous, Laura Mulvey, Friedrich Nietzsche, Antonio Gramsci, Henri Bergson, etc. who deploy for many (but not all) a feminist, queer, decolonial and/or neo-Marxist approach. Among these thinkers, a good number are philosopher-poets whose texts are situated on the borders of literature and thought, and who speak to us of art not as a foreign object to be analyzed without really rubbing shoulders with it, but from the inside, themselves taking the risk of affecting their readership. Students are encouraged to submit reading suggestions.

Objectives

Learn to read and understand philosophical texts through collective and attentive readings of targeted passages in the text.

Develop a good understanding of certain key concepts and be able to use them to think about problems that arise in the field of art in general or in one's own artistic practice.

Method

Each lesson begins with a historical and philosophical contextualization of the text. We then immerse ourselves in the collective reading of certain excerpts, which most often takes the form of a dialogue with the students. Concepts that appear as you read are explained; students are encouraged to ask all the questions that nag them, until the intention of the author becomes clear to them.