Guest Lecture by Ruth Sonderegger: „Emancipation or Violence? Aesthetic Education from Kant to Spivak“

Lecture in English

Recent writings by Jacques Rancière and Gayatri Spivak suggest that Kant and Schiller’s theories of aesthetic education have a vogue, and that aesthetic education is (still) considered particularly emancipatory. In my talk I will first argue that Kant and Schiller’s accounts of aesthetic education are all but unproblematic; especially if judged on their respective emancipatory aspirations. In a second step I will investigate into circumstances under which aesthetic experiences might work in an emancipatory way, nevertheless; in a way, however, that goes against the grain of Kant and Schiller’s theories of aesthetic education. In my conclusion, which is also an overture, I will finally return to Spivak and Rancière but with the aim of transcending them in favour of Fred Moten’s social aesthetics.

Ruth Sonderegger is Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetic Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her main fields of research are the history of aesthetics (in the context of colonial capitalism), practice theories, and cultural as well as resistance studies. Together with Katja Diefenbach and Pablo Valdivia she is currently conducting a research project entitled “Perception, Jurisdiction, and Valorization in Colonial Modernity. On the Nexus of Accumulation, Race, and Aesthetics (https://accumulation-race-aesthetics.org/). Her publications include Art and the Critique of Ideology After 1989 (co-edited with E. Birkenstock, M. J. Hinderer Cruz, and J. Kastner, 2013); Pierre Bourdieu und Jacques Rancière. Ästhetisches Regime oder ästhetische Disposition? (co-edited with J. Kastner, 2014); Vom Leben der Kritik. Kritische Praktiken – und die Notwendigkeit ihrer geopolitischen Situierung, 2019; Polyphone Ästhetik (co-authored with Christoph Brunner, Sofia Bempeza, Katharina Hausladen, and Ines Kleesattel, 2019). She is part of the publishing collective transversal texts (https://transversal.at/)