General Information
Course Description
9605 - Redemption Has No Inside: Aesthetics, Politics and The Real - Allan Pero
“Every work of art is an uncommitted crime”—Adorno, Minima Moralia
This course will consider the knotty question of how aesthetics has been strangely abstracted from ethical and political motivation, and have, in effect, become outlawed or utterly commodified; in Modernity, aesthetics and the art object have, in being condemned to turn necessarily against themselves, against the possibilities for truth, are, as Adorno reminds us in Aesthetic Theory, still nevertheless charged with the task of tending towards some kind of affirmation. For Adorno, "every work of art is an uncommitted crime" insofar as it lives poised, on the precipice of creating the illusion that representation speaks or reveals the truth, that art is potentially a criminal act because of its now sullied relationship to notions of originality, authenticity, and truth. On the other hand, Modern art resists the blandishments of truth and originality through its self-mutilation, by refusing to commit the crime of pretending that art is a reliable witness for truth. Art is also an uncommitted crime in another sense; it only becomes a crime because of our unconscious relationship to it. It is our desire for truth and authenticity that make us kill and steal in the name of possessing the art object. In other words, we frame art for the crimes we commit. One of the primary means by which we will interrogate these problems will be to situate aesthetics, ethics, and politics in the return to/of the Lacanian “Real,” that crucial nexus which binds it together with the Symbolic and the Imaginary to form the Borromean knot. This triad will be deployed as a figure to think through how aesthetics (or, in Rancière’s terms, the “distribution of the sensible”) is a necessary feature of developing a political consciousness that does not simply replicate the status quo, but instead implicates the subject in the production of an aesthetics of agency and dissent. We will then finally turn to Alain Badiou’s recasting of Art as one of the four conditions or truth procedures which might allow us to re-imagine its role in contemporary ethics and politics.
Course texts:
Aesthetic Theory - Theodor Adorno (Minnesota)
Ethics of Psychoanalysis - Jacques Lacan (Norton)
The Other Side of Psychoanalysis - Jacques Lacan (Norton)
Ethics of the Real - Alenka Zupancic (Verso)
Metapolitics - Alain Badiou (Verso)
Logics of Worlds (selections) (Continuum)
Politics of Aesthetics - Jacques Rancière (Continuum)
Aesthetics and Its Discontents- Jacques Rancière (Polity)
