Bernard Stiegler promised but ultimately did not publish a two-volume work on aesthetics to be called Mystagogies. Nevertheless, the work he did publish contains much reflection on the origins and fate of art, the notion of aesthetic judgment, the epochs of art, the significance and difficulties of modern art and contemporary art, and the role of the artist, past and future. This course will conduct a tour of those works, focusing on the visual arts and cinema.
1. General Introduction to the Work of Bernard Stiegler
- Ross, “Introduction to The Neganthropocene”
2. Specific Introduction to Stiegler on Art and Aesthetics
- Ross, “Death or Reinvention”
3. On the Analogico-Digital Image
- “The Discrete Image”, Echographies (1995)
4. Cinematic Time and the Time of Cinema
- “Cinematic Time”, Technics and Time, 3 (2001)
5. Symbolic Misery, Volume 1
- “As Though We Were Lacking” (on Resnais, Same Old Song), Symbolic Misery 1 (2004)
- “Tiresias and the War of Time” (on Bonello, Tiresia), Symbolic Misery 1 (2004)
6. Symbolic Misery, Volume 2
- “Setting Out: From Warhol and Beuys”, Symbolic Misery 2 (2005)
- “Us All: Individuation as Trans-Formation and Trans-formation as Social Sculpture”, Symbolic Misery 2 (2005)
7. Manet and the Tongue of the Eye
- “The Tongue of the Eye: What ‘Art History’ Means’”, Releasing the Image (2011)
8. Duchamp and the Proletarianization of Sensibility
- “The Proletarianization of Sensibility”, Boundary 2 (2011)
9. Kant and the Mystagogy of Aesthetic Judgment
- “Kant, Art, and Time”, Boundary 2 (2011)
10. Caylus, Diderot and the Quarrel of the Amateurs
- “The Quarrel of the Amateurs”, Boundary 2 (2011)
11. The Organology of Cinema and Hossein Sabzian
- “The Organology of Dreams and Arche-Cinema”, The Neganthropocene (2012)
- “On Abbas Kiarostami’s Close Up”, Parrhesia (2014)
12. From Chauvet and Lascaux to Fujihata and Beyond
- “‘Night Gives Birth to Day’ as the ‘Conquest of Imperfection’”, Art in the 21st Century (2019)