Florian Klinger - "Aesthetic Action" - Anton Ford and Kai Ihns
Florian Klinger will discuss Aesthetic Action. He will be joined in conversation by Anton Ford and Kai Ihns. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
At the Co-op
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About the Book: Florian Klinger gives readers a basic action-theoretical account of the aesthetic. While normal action fulfills a determinate concept, Klinger argues, aesthetic action performs an indeterminacy by suspending the action's conceptual resolution. The book examines such indeterminacy by looking at work by Tino Sehgal, Kara Walker, Mazen Kerbaj, Marina Abramović, Cy Twombly, and Franz Kafka. Because it has irresolution as its point, aesthetic action presents itself as an unsettling of ourselves, our ways, our very sense of who we are. As performers of such action, we don't recognize one another as bearers of a shared human form as we normally would, but find ourselves tasked anew with figuring out what sharing a form would mean. In conversation with philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Anscombe; political thinkers such as Marx and Lorde; and contemporary interlocutors such as Michael Thompson, Sebastian Rödl, and Thomas Khurana, Klinger's book makes a case for a conception of the human form that systematically includes the aesthetic: an actualization of the form that is indeterminate and nevertheless rational. The book gives the project of Western philosophical aesthetics a long-overdue formulation for our present that aims to do justice to contemporary aesthetic production as it actually exists.
About the Author: Florian Klinger is Associate Professor in Germanic Studies and the College at the University of Chicago.
About the Interlocutors: Anton Ford is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and a Deputy Dean of the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago.
Kai Ihns is a poet and filmmaker based in Chicago. Currently, she teaches at the University of Chicago as a Humanities Teaching Fellow after completing a PhD project (also at UofC) called *Aspect Choreography* in 2023. Her most recent book of poems is Of (The Elephants, 2024), and she works as an Advisory Poetry Editor at The Paris Review.
Related Titles
In this new book, Florian Klinger gives readers a basic action-theoretical account of the aesthetic. While normal action fulfills a determinate concept, Klinger argues, aesthetic action performs an indeterminacy by suspending the action's conceptual resolution. Taking as examples work by Tino...