Luce deLire & Christian Liclair: Ästhetiken des Widerstands – Ästhetiken der Unterwerfung
Bondage, maschinelles Begehren und Geschlecht
In
a time of political monsters, this lecture explores how power, desire, and submission are aesthetically produced and negotiated
through contemporary image politics, bodies, and technologies.
The world is
in turmoil. Power relations and aesthetics are being renegotiated. Politics is going crazy. In two lectures, we will therefore
examine contemporary aesthetic regimes of voluntary submission between power, desire, and discipline. We will examine the
body, image, contract, gender, empire, and race in the field of tension between art, theory, and political imagination. It's
about sex, lust, control, and their technological and ideological mediations.
Using contemporary image politics,
we will focus on the aesthetics of tyranny and fascism. We will analyze how consent, affect, and submission are aesthetically
produced—including a small performative intervention. Drawing on the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and current work on gender
and sexuality, we will examine the aesthetic conditions of the organization of collective bodies.
Based on queer
film and performance works of the 1990s (including Michelle Handelman), bondage, ritual, sacredness, and mechanical desire
will be intertwined. Bondage appears here not as a marginal phenomenon, but as a figure of thought for questions of authority,
interface, translation, and contemporary forms of artificial intimacy.
“The old world is dying, the new one is
not yet born: it is the time of monsters.” (Antonio Gramsci) Let us become monsters.
An event organised by
the Department of Art Theory
