Lecture
LCCP Colloquium "Singing Unsung Stories: From Disinterest to Strange Taste"
- Date
- Thursday 17 October 2024
- Time
- Location
-
P.J. Veth
Nonnensteeg 1-3
2311 VJ Leiden - Room
- 0.06
Leiden Centre for Continental Philosophy is pleased to announce a talk by Monique Roelofs, Professor of Philosophy of Art and Culture at the University of Amsterdam.
Abstract
Taste has gone out of favor in aesthetics. And yet, consumer choices are more massively conditioned by it than ever. Where does this leave the presumed disinterested dimension of taste and its links with singularity and individuality as well as publicness, foregrounded by Enlightenment philosophers? Artists and writers such as Clarice Lispector and Tania Bruguera critically deploy what I call “strange tastes” to tell untold stories and transform constellations of aesthetic relationality. This talk turns to a philosophically central ingredient of taste, disinterest, to link it in a new way to the organization of what I call “aesthetic publicness.” Disinterested attention, I will argue, is an important component of a decolonial feminist aesthetics. However, it needs support from strange taste to do its critical and constructive work and to attain the relational effects that are crucial to a contemporary aesthetic politics and to the realization of ethically, politically, and aesthetically flourishing forms of publicness. Drawing on current views of disinterest and highlighting its functioning in several artistic cases, the talk explicates the notion of strange taste and elaborates its theoretical and critical significance.
About
Monique Roelofs is Professor of Philosophy of Art and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. She has published widely on the relation between aesthetics and politics, with a special focus on the dynamics of race, gender, nation, coloniality, and the global. She is the author of Arts of Address: Being Alive to Language and The World (Columbia UP, 2020) and The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic (Bloomsbury 2014). Roelofs is currently completing a monograph titled Strange Tastes: Aesthetic Sensibility and the Public in Latin American and Latinx Feminisms (under contract with Duke UP) and a second book-length investigation on the aesthetics of address. She recently coedited the collection Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings (Bloomsbury, 2024).
All are welcome!