General Information
Course Description
The Byzantine Omelette: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Real - Allan Pero
This course will consider the knotty question of how aesthetics has been strangely abstracted from ethical and political motivation, and will attempt to unravel this knot by reading thinkers who evince, overtly and covertly, a suspicion of Benjamin’s famous chiasm which links Marxism to the politicization of the aesthetic, and relegates fascism to an aestheticization of the political. One of the primary means by which we will interrogate the relative strengths and weaknesses of Benjamin’s chiastic bon mot 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.
Course texts:
Ethics of the Real - Alenka Zupan…i… (Verso)
Ethics of Psychoanalysis - Jacques Lacan (Norton)
Politics of Aesthetics - Jacques Rancière (Continuum)
Aesthetics and Its Discontents- Jacques Rancière (Polity)
Aesthetic Theory - Theodor Adorno (Minnesota)
The Other Side of Psychoanalysis - Jacques Lacan (Norton)
Metapolitics/Infinite Thought (selections) - Alain Badiou (Verso/Continuum)
Distribution of Grades:
Essay - 30%
Seminar - 30%
Response Paper - 10%
Panel Presentation - 10%
Respondent to Seminar (2) - 10% (each)
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