Florian Klinger: Aesthetic Action
@ Seminary Co-op Bookstore
5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL 60637
Opening Thursday, October 17th, from 6PM - 7PM
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
RSVP Here (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required).
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 finishing up her PhD at the University of Chicago, where she studies film and contemporary experimental poetics, focusing on a form she calls “aspect choreography.” She is the author of sundaey (Propeller Books, 2020), and numerous pamphlets, including one with the Earthbound Poetry Series, and two in 2023—GREEN SKY (slub press) and WEDNESDAY (Creative Writing Department). She lives in Chicago, and works as an editor for Chicago Review and Fence.
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Tags: Aesthetic Action, Anton Ford, Chicago, Florian Klinger, Florian Klinger - "Aesthetic Action" - Anton Ford and Kai Ihns, Hyde Park, Kai Ihns, Seminary Co Op Bookstore
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