Fed up with the prohibitions that
have been placed on thought since the
Critique of Pure Reason and
enforced by the inheritors of the Kantian paradigm for far too long,
contemporary philosophy is no longer content to hesitate at the threshold of
human experience. A renewed interest in speculative philosophy is quickly
coming to characterise the theoretical and philosophical paradigms of the
opening decades of our century. New inflections of pre-critical realism and materialism
are redefining the fraught relationship between philosophy and the sciences and
once again granting thought licence to go beyond the limits of its empirical
relation to the world. Ours is an era of grand systems, novel ontologies and
non-dogmatic metaphysics. However, if we subscribe to the radical
democratisation or disavowal of human experience proposed by such philosophies,
how do we rethink the relationship, even the possibility, of art and
aesthetics?
Via the collective close-reading of key speculative realist texts we hope to confront the marginalisation of aesthetics in the wake of the speculative turn and reconsider the consequences of such thought for human systems of representation in order to discover new possibilities for artistic, and specifically literary, practice. This reading group will consolidate and invigorate engagement with speculative realism in Australia, creating a local hub for Antipodean work on new materialisms and new realisms.
Contact us: aesthetics.after.finitude@gmail.com
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