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Art and Politics: Introduction to Phenomenological Aesthetics

October 26, 2018 @ 6:30 pm - 9:00 pm +04

About the Event:

The two lectures aim to deliver some important clues into phenomenological aesthetics, thereby also showing the political relevance of this approach to artistic experience. Phenomenology is a practice of description of the experience with the goal of answering the question of “What is this phenomenon?” If we want to do a phenomenology of anything appearing to us, we must describe the experience in the first of what appears. In the case of art, phenomenologists have put the accent on the experience of creation and perception of artworks. One of the most influential philosophers in this task was Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961); in his short essay Eye and Mind (1960), he draws on his own experience of modern paintings as well as the testimony of major painters (Van Gogh, Cézanne, Giacometti among others) in order to understand what is at stake in our experience of art. In so doing, he highlights the correlation of perception and motility, i.e. that perception is always a kind of movement, and movement always a kind of relation with the world. Art then is a means to transform our perception and movement; in other words, the reception of art is always performative, and the aim of the first lecture is to show how this allows to extend Merleau-Ponty’s approach beyond painting towards other arts, including those appearing after his death, such as video or performance.
The second lecture focuses on the political dimension of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and the connection of politics and aesthetics in the phenomenological perspective. This should be relevant in the present revolutionary Armenia. First, the lecture will show how to introduce the collective dimension from a method basically focusing on the individual subject’s experience. Then it will demonstrate how meaning appears in the collective history by discussing the very crucial concept of institution, first introduced by Husserl and then developed by Merleau-Ponty. This concept allows to understand how change in collective history appears and how it remains, how it sediments. The question at the end will be to situate precisely the role of artistic production in those changes, and particularly in front of the phenomenon of power.

About the Speaker:

Stefan Kristensen is a philosopher. He obtained his PhD in 2007 with a thesis on “Speech and Subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Expression” and gained his “Habilitation” in Toulouse in 2016 with “The Sensible Machine,” a work on the concept of the machine in relation to the emergence of subjectivity in psychopathology and aesthetics. He has held various postdoc positions at the University of Geneva in the Philosophy Art History departments. Since 2017 he is a research fellow at the University of Heidelberg with a grant from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. His current research focused on the unconscious in the psychosomatic tradition. Together with Anna Barseghian, he is co-founder of Utopiana, artistic projects and residencies in Yerevan and Geneva. Kristensen is a former member of the City council of the City of Geneva (2011-2013). His main publications include Parole et subjectivité (Olms, 2010); Jean-Luc Godard Philosophe (L’Âge d’Homme, 2014), La Machine sensible (Hermann, 2017).

Language: English with simultaneous translation into Armenian

Details

Date:
October 26, 2018
Time:
6:30 pm - 9:00 pm +04
Event Categories:
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Organizers

General Education