Séminaires 2020-2021 (en anglais)

 

Site Internet du séminaire / Seminar’s Website
https://grammarsoflistening.wordpress.com

 

Rejoindre la réunion Zoom

ID de réunion / Meeting ID  : 988 3917 1696

Mot de passe / Passcode : PHILO

 

 

 

Visite de Clemencia Echeverri, lors de la 7ème séance le 21 Avril 2021
Site Internet de l’artiste

 

 

This seminar inquires into the kinds of “grammars” that would need to be inaugurated in order to render audible what otherwise remains unheard and unheard-of as a consequence of what we will analyze as “traumatic forms of violence” – in their capacity to silence, erase, hide and deny their own shattering effects. By “grammars” we will understand frameworks of sense broadly speaking – taking sense here both in terms of the sensible as well as in terms of meaning, conceptual and otherwise. Accordingly, to ask about these grammars is to ask how to radically redistribute sense in order to subvert the frameworks that decide in advance what “deserves” to be audible, memorable, grievable—or not. In Spanish I call them “gramáticas de lo inaudito”, since the word “inaudito” points both to the unheard and the unheard-of, namely, what hasn’t (yet) been rendered audible and what is ethically unacceptable. The seminar will trace the close connection between the two : it is precisely because traumatic violence inaugurates unprecedented forms of harm – forms of harm absolutely unheard of and which thus challenge our ethical imagination in radical ways – that we do not yet have the grammars to approach them properly and make them audible, much less intelligible or even believable. We will approach the subject by asking first about “trauma” from a philosophical perspective, inquiring into the kind of challenges it poses to our conceptions of experience, in order then to move into questions around the possibilities of its representation, memorialization and historical indexation – that is, into the conditions of possibility of more radical form of listening. Art will play an essential role in this context, and we will study ways in which works of art resist oblivion and inaugurate grammars that make audible what has been rendered inaudito (we will bring in examples from Latin America, in contexts of political violence where we find radical forms of silencing and erasure).

 

For updates on the seminar sessions, announcements, and discussion forums after the seminar, refer to https://grammarsoflistening.wordpress.com. All the readings will be uploaded online in a google drive. To access the drive and subscribe to the seminar’s email list please send your name, institutional affiliation (if any) and short description of your interests to acostaparisviiiseminars@gmail.com.

 

 

 

Session 1 (March 10) : From Aesthetics as Critique to Grammars of Listening : On Reconfiguring Sensibility as a Political Task (introduction to both seminars)

 

Session 2 (March 17) : Trauma and the Breakdown of all Grammar
Main reading : Freud, S. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18 (London : Hogarth, 1953), sections I-IV, pp. 7-33. Recommended : Caruth, C. Unclaimed Experience : Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore : John Hopkins University Press, 1996), Introduction and Conclusions ; Caruth, C. Literature in the Ashes of History (Baltimore : John Hopkins University Press, 2013), Chapter 1. Other : Berlant, L. Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2011), Chapter 2 ; LaCapra, D. “Traumatropisms”. History and its Limits. Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2009), 59- 89 ; Pérez, J.D. “Hacia una (re)vocalización del trauma : una crítica a Caruth desde la ética de la escucha,” Perífrasis 9:18 (2018) : 117-133 ; Rottenberg, E. “Freud’s Other Legacy”, Parrhesia 21 (2014) : 13-22.

 

Session 3 (March 24) : Storytelling and Grammars of Silence
Main reading : Benjamin, W. “The Storyteller”, Illuminations : Essays and Reflections (NY : Schocken, 1969) : 83- 110. Recommended : Oyarzún, P., “Narration and Justice,” in Doing justice : Three essays on Walter Benjamin (Polity Press, 2020), 75-107 ; Wynter, S. “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Savacou, no. 5 (June 1971) : 95-102. Other : Castillejo-Cuellar, A. “La localización del daño : Etnografía, espacio y confesión en el escenario transicional colombiano,” Horizontes Antropológicos 20:42 (2014) : 213-236, Acosta López, M.R. “La narración y la memoria de lo inolvidable. Un comentario al ensayo “El narrador” de Walter Benjamin,” in Andrade, M. (ed.), Walter Benjamin, aquí y ahora (Bogotá : Universidad de los Andes, 2018), 175-196.

 

Session 4 (March 31) : Grammars of Listening and the Task of Imagination
Main readings : Arendt H. Origins of Totalitarianism, Chapter 12 and 13 (Harcourt, 1973) : 389-480 ; Arendt, H. “Understanding and Politics”. Essays in Understanding (Schocken : New York, 2004), 307-327. Recommended : Sharpe, C. In the Wake (Duke University Press, 2016), Chapters 1 and 4 ; Acosta López, M.R. “Totalitarianism as Structural Violence : Towards New Grammars of Listening,” in O’Byrne, A. and Shuster, M. Logics of Genocide : The Structures ofViolence and the Contemporary World (London/NY : Routledge, 2020) : 173-186.

 

Session 5 (April 7) : On Political Violence and the Colonization of Listening
Main readings : Cavarero, A. “The Vocal Body,” Qui parle, 21(1) (2012) : 71-83 ; Cavarero, A. Horrorism : Naming Contemporary Violence (NY : Columbia UP, 2009) (selections TBA) ; Dorfman, A. Death and the Maiden (New York : Penguin Books, 1991). Recommended : Cavarero, A. Relating Narratives. Storytelling and Selfhood (NY : Routledge, 2000) (selection TBA) ; Fanon, Franz Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York : Grove Press, 2008, Chapter 5 ; Vallega, A. “Displacements—Beyond the Coloniality of Images”, Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 206–227 Other : Acosta López, M.R. “Perder la voz propia : de una fenomenología feminista de la voz a una aproximación a la violencia política desde la escucha,” commisioned for Luciana Cadahia and Ana Carrasco Conde, Fuera de sí mismas. Motivos para dislocarse (Madrid, Herder, 2020) : 121-156.

 

Session 6 (April 14) : Listening to the Erasures of History
Main readings : García Márquez, G. One Hundred Years of Solitude (selected fragment). Recommended : Acosta López, M.R. “One Hundred Years of Forgotteness : Aesth-Ethics of Memory in Latin America,” Philosophical Readings, Special Issue on Philosophy in Colombia, XI:3 (2019) 163-17. Other : Acosta López, M.R. “La Resistencia de lo inarchivable : del mito a la historia en Musa Paradisíaca de José Alejandro Restrepo,” in Dialogo : a Journal for Latin American Studies 22:2 (2019) 35-48 ; Caruth, C. Literature in the Ashes of History (Baltimore : John Hopkins University Press, 2013), Chapter 5 ; Mendoza, A and Thomas, T. “Literary and Visual Rememory at the 90th Anniversary of the Banana Massacre in Colombia” (cf. https://zapruderworld.org/volume-5/literary-and-visual-rememory-at-the-90th-anniversary-of-the-banana-massacre-in-colombia/) ; Uribe, A. “¿Pueden los hechos históricos resistirse a la mendacidad ? Sobre la matanza de las bananeras,” Revista Co-herencia 7:13 (2010), 43-67.

 

Session 7 (April 21) : The Sound of Disappearance
With the presence and intervention of Clemencia Echeverri, artist.
For this session and in preparation for Clemencia Echeverri’s visit to class, please have a look at her work Duelos (available here), as well as Professor Acosta’s interview with her (available with English subtitles here).
Main readings : J.D. Pérez, “Sonorous Rubble, Mourning Affect,” in Echeverri, C. Duelos (Museo Nacional y Ministerio de Cultura, 2019) 66-79 ; Acosta López, M.R. “Art as Resistance to Erasure : on Fragmentos by Doris Salcedo and Duelos by Clemencia Echeverri”, in Lina Britto and Ricardo López-Pedreros, Colombia Revisited (2 vols) (NY : Routledge, forthcoming). Recommended : Chirolla, G. “The Politics of the Scream in a Threnody,” in Zepke, S. and Sullivan, S. (eds.) Deleuze and Contemporary Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 15-33 ; Uribe, M.V. “Against Violence and Oblivion : The Case of Colombia’s Disappeared,” in Polit Dueñas, G. and Rueda, G. (eds.) Meanings of Violence in Contemporary Latin America (Palgrave) : 38-52 Other : Bargu, B. “Sovereignty as Erasure. Rethinking Enforced Disappearances,” Qui Parle : Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 23 : 1 (2014) : 35-75.
NOTE : this session could be moved to the last session and session 8 would become the 7th. Follow announcements in the worldpress blog for an update later during the semester.

 

Session 8 (May 12) : Decolonizing Grammars, Decolonizing Memory
Encina, P. Hamaca Paraguaya (film). Recommended : Acosta López, M.R. “Hamaca Paraguaya de Paz Encina (notas sobre la resistencia de la memoria)” ; N. Brizuela, “A Sense of Place : Paz Encina’s Radical Poetics”, Film Quarterly 70 : 4 (2017) 49-64 Other : Acosta López, M.R. “Gramáticas de lo inaudito as Decolonial Grammars : Notes for a Decolonization of Memory,” in Alejandro Vallega (ed.) Philosophy and Liberation in Latin America, a Primary Source Reader (London : Bloomsbury, forthcoming) ; S. Rivera Cusicanqui, “Palabras mágicas : reflexiones sobre la crisis presente” y “Oralidad, mirada y memoria del cuerpo en los Andes”, Un mundo ch’ixi es posible (Buenos Aires : Tinta limón, 2018) 93-134 ; Rocío Zambrana, “Vida póstuma” https://www.80grados.net/vida-postuma/

 

Acosta López, M.R. “Gramáticas de lo inaudito as Decolonial Grammars : Notes for a Decolonization of Memory,” in Alejandro Vallega (ed.) Philosophy and Liberation in Latin America, a Primary Source Reader (London : Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

Freud, S. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18 (London : Hogarth, 1953).

Benjamin, W. “The Storyteller”, Illuminations : Essays and Reflections (NY : Schocken, 1969) : 83- 110.

Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, Chapter 12 and 13 (Harcourt, 1973) : 389-480.

Cavarero, A. Relating Narratives. Storytelling and Selfhood (NY : Routledge, 2000), “The Vocal Body,” Qui parle, 21(1) (2012) : 71-83 and Horrorism : Naming Contemporary Violence (NY : Columbia UP, 2009) (selections).

Dorfman, A. Death and the Maiden (New York : Penguin Books, 1991) [“Being Robbed of One’s Voice : On Listening and Political Violence in Adriana Cavarero” in Political Bodies : Writings on Adriana Cavarero’s Political Thought, P. Landerreche Cardillo and R. Silverbloom eds. (Albany : SUNY Press, forthcoming).]

Llosa, C. La teta asustada (film) [Theidon, K. “The milk of sorrow,” Canadian Women Studies, 27:1 (2019) : 8-16.]

García Márquez, G. One Hundred Years of Solitude (selected fragment) [Acosta López, M.R. “One Hundred Years of Forgotteness : Aesth-Ethics of Memory in Latin America,” Philosophical Readings, Special Issue on Philosophy in Colombia, XI:3 (2019) 163-171.]

Acosta López, M.R. “Art as Resistance to Erasure : on Fragmentos by Doris Salcedo and Duelos by Clemencia Echeverri”, in Lina Britto and Ricardo López-Pedreros, Colombia Revisited (2 vols) (NY : Routledge, forthcoming).

Encina, P. Hamaca Paraguaya (film) [Acosta López, M.R. “Hamaca Paraguaya de Paz Encina (notas sobre la resistencia de la memoria)”.]

 

 

 

 

This course departs from a broad conception of aesthetics as the realm in which, through our senses, perceptions and desires, sense is (re)framed, (re)distributed, and either made intelligible or rendered imperceptible (invisible, inaudible, untouchable). That is, aesthetics is understood as always already political and, if taken up critically, as a political task. The seminar will begin by focusing on some of the philosophical foundations of aesthetics at the end of 18th century in Germany and the important turn, at the beginning of the 19th century, from aesthetics to philosophy of art. Special attention will be paid to F. Schiller as a thinker who, starting from Kant’s critique of aesthetics, will move towards a conception of aesthetics as critique. As we will see, such a conception will prove influential for G.W.F. Hegel’s approach to the philosophical and historical role of art, as well as for later aesthetical-political approaches to critique (and the critical potential of art) such as those of the Frankfurt School in the first half of 20th century. Examining some of these more contemporary approaches (with particular attention to W. Benjamin and H. Marcuse), we will then turn to their interpellations, critiques and creative appropriations by Latin American and Caribbean thinkers, in order to explore the possible (dis)connections between aesthetics understood as a historical-political critical task and a decolonial perspective. The reading list for this section will include readings by Eduard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, Nelly Richard and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, accompanied by concrete examples of Latin American artistic and cultural interventions.

 

 

 

 

Kant, I. Critique of the Power of Judgment, tr. Paul Guyer (Cambridge : Cambridge U.P, 2000) (selection, special attention will be paid to §9).

Schiller, F. “Kallias or Concerning Beauty : Letters to Körner”, in Classic and Romantics German Aesthetics, ed. Jay M. Bernstein (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2003) : 145-184 and “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humankind,” in Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel Dahlstrom (New York : Continuum, 2001) : 86-178.

Hegel, G.W.F., Lectures on Fine Art, tr. T.M. Knox (Oxford : Claredon Press, 1925), Introduction.

Benjamin, W. “Critique of Violence” (SW1, 236-252) and “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproductibility” (Third Version) (SW 4, 251-270).

Marcuse, H. “The Aesthetic Dimension” in Eros and Civilization : a Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston : Beacon Press, 1955) : 172-196.

Glissant, E. Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1997) and Caribbean Discourse : Selected Essays (Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 1999) (selection).

Wynter, S. “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’ : Notes towards a Deciphering Practice,” in Ex-hiles : essays on Caribbean Cinema (Trenton : Africa World Press, 1992), 237-280.

Richard, N. “Ruptures, Memory and Discontinuities” in The Insubordination of Signs : Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis, Duke University Press, 2004, 1-21.

Rivera Cusicanqui, S. “Palabras mágicas : reflexiones sobre la crisis presente” y “Oralidad, mirada y memoria del cuerpo en los Andes”, Un mundo ch’ixi es posible (Buenos Aires : Tinta limón, 2018) 93-134. (No translation available, we’ll read in English “Sociology of the Image : A View from Colonial Andean History” in Ch’ixinakax utxiwa : On Decolonising Practices and Discourses, tr. Molly Geidel (Cambridge : Polity, 2020) : 12-45.