School of Arts & Aesthetics
&
Centre of German Studies, JNU
Invites you to a lecture by
Andrea Allerkamp
European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)
on
Moving Constellations
The political challenge of the aesthetic regime
In critical philosophy the systematization of sensual perception leads us to two sources of knowledge – sensoriality and intellect. I shall discuss Alexander G. Baumgarten’s fundamental insight into a new discipline of aesthetics. In order to enlarge the realm of legitimate cognition and to include sensual forms in philosophy Baumgarten provokes an epistemological break which operates with poetical terms of transition and similarity: “The path to truth leads from
night through dawn to noon”, it says in § 7 of Baumgartens Aesthetica. In Baumgarten’s attempt to overcome the rational metaphysics through a thinking in similarities, we are confronted with a gap between presence and presentation. It is the political dimension of this gap that draws our attention to Jacques Rancière’s aesthetical regime of arts. In modern democracy we have to face the challenge of common places of sensual experience where political conflicts become visible. Rancière’s return to Baumgarten’s Aesthetica is owed to the insight that politics can only exist
as a coming to be in narration and poetry: Il y a politique – There are politics.
Andrea Allerkamp is Professor of Western European Literatures at European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany.
Chair : Anil Bhatti, Professor Emeritus, Centre of German Studies, JNU
Time and Date : 5.00 p.m., Thursday, 8th February 2018
Venue : Auditorium, School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi