A. Barale, «Unbewaffnetes Auge»: Benjamin’s interpretation of comedy in Shakespeare and Molière, in “Aisthesis”, 12(2), 2019, pp. 127-133.
This essay examines two texts that Walter Benjamin wrote in 1918, during his period in Bern, on S... more This essay examines two texts that Walter Benjamin wrote in 1918, during his period in Bern, on Shakespeare's comedy As you like it and on Le malade imagi-naire by Molière. When these texts are considered together, a question arises. What is the role of the comic inside Benjamin's philosophy, in this period and also in the years to follow? Is the comic really only the other side of mourning, as Benjamin writes in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, or does it also have another significance, a significance of its own? Moreover, why should Shakespeare's comedy be the opposite of Molière's comedy, as Benjamin writes in the paper on Molière? In order to answer, we are going to set a connection between Shakespeare's «unarmed eye» (As you like it) and the «innocence» (Fate and Character) that Molière's comedy indicates. This will also lead us to another text that was of much significance to Benja-min (GB, 02/02/1920 et al.), Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma. Here too, as in As you like it, there is an innocent protagonist trying to escape from the evil of a court. Yet Shakespeare's As you like it ends with the reconstruction of a court. What does Benja-min mean, then, when he states that in As you like it «everything ends in loneliness»? The answer will provide a point of convergence between Shakespeare's and Molière's comedy. Benjamin's idea of «Weltlichkeit» (ibid.), of which comedy is a necessary part, will prove to be an alternative to the "armed" character of the court.
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Speakers include: Alice Barale, Fabrizio Desideri,Julia Reinhard Lupton, Freddie Rokem, Howard Caygill, Julia Ng, Andrew Benjamin, Björn Quiring and Fabrizio Desideri.
This conference is organised by Andrew Benjamin, Anniversary Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at Kingston University and Julia Ng, Lecturer in Critical Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Speakers include: Alice Barale, Fabrizio Desideri,Julia Reinhard Lupton, Freddie Rokem, Howard Caygill, Julia Ng, Andrew Benjamin, Björn Quiring and Fabrizio Desideri.
This conference is organised by Andrew Benjamin, Anniversary Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at Kingston University and Julia Ng, Lecturer in Critical Theory and Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London.
In this paper, this thesis will be confronted with a new type of art, the art made through artificial intelligence. In particular, the focus will be on some artworks made through a kind of AI called
Latent spaces: what aI art can teLL us about aesthetIc experIence
GANs (generative adversarial networks). If one considers these pictures, one may notice that they share with some early Twentieth century paintings the fact that colour becomes somewhat independent from the outlines and drawing. Outlines are very blurred and the identities of the objects are not certain. Nevertheless, this type of colour in GANs pictures doesn’t demonstrate a denial of the task of identifying things. On the contrary, it is precisely concerned with the machine’s very attempt to classify objects. Moreover, even if we recognize in the AI our own attempts to classify and comprehend the world (the Ai as an “uncanny mirror” of ourselves), the AI remains nevertheless something other than ourselves. Therefore, the aesthetic pleasure when faced with these pictures implies the expectation not only of a possible knowledge, but also of a new relationship with an other. This will allow some considerations on the very notion of aesthetics itself.
between Calderon – from whose Life Is a Dream Hofmannsthal’s drama is taken – and Shakespeare. While Calderon’s image is – Benjamin wrote in another letter – an “intensification of speech itself ”, Shakespeare’s image is “similitude and figure of action and man”. The political value of this difference will be investigated through another work that will have a great importance for Benjamin a few years later, The Master of Ballantrae.
What is the fundamental “meaning” that Benjamin finds in this book?
Keywords: Benjamin, Calderon, Figure, Language, Shakespeare, Trauerspiel.
Digital Aesthetics
https://dgae.lakecomoschool.org/
29th May- 1rst June 2023
In 1936 the philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote about a great change triggered by the technological reproduction of images. Photography and cinema were transforming not only the forms of art, but also the way humans perceived the world. It was the human way of looking at things that was deeply modified. Through these new technologies, humans were learning to come closer to objects and to play with their images. “Optics” and “touch” were becoming strictly intertwined. Today, this idea of an essential change in our way of perceiving the world has become true in a way that largely exceeds Benjamin’s expectations. Digital technologies have become more than just an instrument. Rather, they have also become an environment in which we move, permeating our experience of the world.
The summer school will be organized by the University of Milan in collaboration with the European Seminar of Aesthetics – an international network of academics and researchers founded in 2014 with the aim of fostering critical debate on key topics in aesthetics (https://sites.unimi.it/eu_aesthetics/about/) – and with the Milano Painting Academy (https://www.milanopaintingacademy.it/mpa/). It will address the new challenges faced by aesthetics in the digital era. Aesthetics is a discipline that was born in 1700, in a cultural and historical context far removed from the present. However, from the beginning, aesthetics constituted itself as a philosophical investigation of the “sensible knowledge” (Baumgarten), i.e. of the sensory way in which humans experience the world. For this reason, it is an important duty of aesthetics to understand how this experience changes in the context of the new digital technologies.
In fact, the digital reproduction, creation, transformation and diffusion of images, videos, texts and sounds affects not only the domain of art (with the origin of new forms of art such as digital photography, video art, digital art and, more recently, AI art), but in a broader sense, different aspects of our everyday life, too. In fact, through digital technologies everyday life often acquires a strong aesthetic value (let’s think of food photographs, selfies, travel pictures on blogs and social networks…). Moreover, through digital content, we build and convey identities, tastes and desires.
Through an interdisciplinary dialogue among philosophers of aesthetics, philosophers of science, artists, photographers, scholars of visual culture and media studies, the summer school will address four important aspects of digital aesthetics, which will correspond to the four sections (one and a half days each) of the program:
Digital aesthetics and values. Digital images and texts have become an expression of values, which are shared by an increasingly large number of subjects. The first day of the school will reexamine the connection between aesthetic experience and values. In fact, values don’t originate from a propositional process. Rather, they are primarily something which has to be felt. Emotions, sensible experience of the world, and values are strictly intertwined. For this reason, it is particularly important to investigate how values can be created, transformed and communicated through digital content. Can digital content convey a true or authentic experience of values? Can the transformative power of digital technologies help to keep values alive? Or is it bound to bury them under a great quantity of fakes instead? These are some of the questions that will be addressed on the first day.
Digital photography. At its origins, photography has often been considered not so much as art, but rather as a reproduction of reality. Nevertheless, many photographers have utilized this technology as an extraordinary means to express content in an original way. With digital photography, the transformative power of pictures has become even more evident. Digital photographs can be manipulated at every step: colors, lights and even subjects can be changed and adapted to express the author’s intentions. Can digital images still be considered as “photographs”? What is their relationship to reality? How can digital photographs tell the truth or (in connection with the first day of the school) convey true values? These are some of the topics that will be discussed.
Art and artificial intelligence. A very interesting type of art that emerged recently is certainly the art made through artificial intelligence. Can an artificial intelligence be creative? Who is the author of these works, is it the human artist or the algorithm? What does this type of art have to say on the new presence that the AI represents in our society? These are some of the questions that will be addressed during the third day of the summer school.
Colour and drawing in the digital age. Colour and drawing have often been considered as two opposite poles of the visual artistic process. Drawing has typically represented the ideal aspect of the picture, the project which the artist can realize and control. Colour, on the contrary, was often regarded as the vehicle of emotion and sensible pleasure. For this reason, it was considered sometimes dangerous and difficult to regulate. In the Nineteenth Century, as it is well known, both color and drawing became increasingly independent from the reproduction of reality and acquired an autonomous expressive power. Yet what is happening today, in the context of digital images? How have color and drawing changed, and with it, the relationship between them? These are some of the questions that will be raised during the third and last day of the school, in a dialogue that will involve also the Milano Painting Academy (https://www.milanopaintingacademy.it/mpa/).
Application
The School is directed toward PhD students, advanced master students and postdocs. In order to participate, it is necessary to have a bachelor degree (three years). It is not necessary for participants to have studied philosophy; other fields are also welcome, since the philosophical questions will be raised through an interdisciplinary approach, involving performative arts, technology, figurative arts etc.
Participants will have the opportunity to prepare a short talk (5 minutes, 1 page length) and later elaborate upon it in a paper. The best papers will be selected to be published in a special issue of the journal “Itinera” (https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/itinera). The last edition of our summer school, Aesthetics Technique and Emotion (https://aeat.lakecomoschool.org/) was the subject of “Itinera”, 19, 2020: https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/itinera/issue/archive
Registration fee will be 160 euros per person. A minimum of 15 students will be required to start the school. Accomodation is not included, you can find some suggestions on the Accomodation page.
HOW TO APPLY: Prospective participants are required to fill out and submit the form below, and upload a PDF file (max. 2MB) including a CV.
Deadline for Registration: April 20th, 2023
Notification of acceptance: April 27th, 2023
In the face of these innovations, what tools for thinking can be provided by aesthetics, a discipline that was born in the eighteenth century, in a necessarily very different cultural environment? What role can categories such as beauty, ugliness, sublime, kitsch, or concepts such as genius and taste play today? How is it possible to rethink our idea of the art and the artist, or the relationship between the artists and the techniques used in their works?
The School aims to involve students and researchers from different backgrounds in the discussion. The morning talks will be given by international experts, while the afternoon will be dedicated to an one more speaker and to the discussion of the day’s topics.
ore 10 Palazzo Curini, Via Santa Maria 89, Aula A4
Coordina: N. Ramazzotto (Zetesis-Unipi)
10,00 M. Marcheschi (Zetesis-FSC-Modena), Introduzione
10,15 F. Desideri (Unifi), La rovina e il Trauerspiel dell’opera. Simmel, Benjamin, Kiefer
11,15 A. Barale (Unifi), “A Hideaway in the Wastelands": Warburg, Benjamin e la AI art
12,15 G. Pucci (Unisi), Rovine, macerie, memoria: eterocronia e eterotopia
ore 14,30 Palazzo Curini, Via Santa Maria 89, Aula B2
Coordina: E. Bacchi (Zetesis-Unipi)
14,30 C. De Cosmo (Zetesis-Unipi), Das Schiffshaus: rovine, frammenti e non contemporaneità nel pensiero di E. Bloch
15,30. F. De Simone (FSC-Modena), La ricostruzione come distruzione della distruzione: Günther Anders e la storia in rovina
16,45 S. Tedesco (Unipa), Buchstabenbrücke zwischen Unglück und Trost. Rovina, malinconia, tessitura estetica nella scrittura di Sebald