2023-24 Speaker Series
Each year The Speaker Series brings in several visiting guest lecturers. Speakers over the years have included Jean Baudrillard, Lauren Berlant, Peter Brooks, Norman Bryson, David Carroll, Anthony Cascardi, Wlad Godzich, Jean-Joseph Goux, Elizabeth Grosz, N. Katherine Hayles, Linda Hutcheon, Martin Jay, Michael Hardt, Agnes Heller, Barbara Johnson, David Farrell Krell, Murray Krieger, Arthur Kroker, Dominick LaCapra, Jerome McGann, J. Hillis Miller, Chantal Mouffe, Christopher Norris, Mark Poster, Richard Rorty, Charles Scott, Thomas Sebeok, Kaja Silverman, Gayatri Spivak, Bernard Stiegler, Samuel Weber, Hayden White, Slavoj Žižek, and many others.
Upcoming speakers:
October 5, 2023
4:00 p.m. EST
Prof. Gabriel Rockhill
Department of Philosophy, Villanova University
Ideology, Art & Class Struggle
This presentation will provide an overview of my research to date on aesthetics and politics. It will begin by outlining the compositional model of ideology, which foregrounds the aesthetic dimensions of ideological experience by drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s important conceptualization of common sense (as opposed to good sense). It will then examine, more specifically, the bourgeois ideology of art, with a particular focus on the problems inherent in the theorists of the “contradiction of the art of the commonplace” (Jacques Rancière, Arthur Danto, Herbert Marcuse). Finally, it will raise the essential question of how to challenge this bourgeois ideology by elucidating how culture is a central site of class struggle. Through the course of this overall trajectory, a number of concrete examples of works of art will be shared in order to foster a rich conversation dealing with both theory and practice.
Watch some of our previous talks on YouTube
Past Speakers:
Rocío Zambrana
Metamorphosis of Value: Epistemic Protocols in the Long 17th Century
April 3, 2023
Alia Al-Saji
Making the Colonial Past Hesitate: Fanon, amputation, and a politics of refusal
March 13, 2023
Kirill Chepurin
Cross-Scalar Romanticism
November 15, 2022
Denise Ferreira da Silva
Deep implicancy
October 17, 2022
April 20, 2022
Shona N. Jackson
Beyond Constraint: Labour, Grammar, and Desire
April 13, 2022
