A talk by GRAHAM HARMAN

 "The Aesthetic and the Literal"

Sunday, February 25th, 2024, 3-5 pm

at Phase Gallery

Graham Harman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. He is the author of over twenty books, most recently The Graham Harman Reader (2023, edited by Jon Cogburn & Niki Young) and Objects Untimely: Object-Oriented Philosophy and Archaeology (2023, co-authored with Christopher Witmore), and his work has been translated into twenty-six languages.

In this talk, Harman will focus on the ideas discussed in his book “Art + Objects” published in 2020 by Polity Press.

In this book, the founder of object-oriented ontology develops his view that aesthetics is the central discipline of philosophy. Whereas science must attempt to grasp an object in terms of its observable qualities, philosophy and art cannot proceed in this way because they don't have direct access to their objects. Hence philosophy shares the same fate as art in being compelled to communicate indirectly, allusively, or elliptically, rather than in the clear propositional terms that are often taken – wrongly – to be the sole stuff of genuine philosophy.

Conceiving of philosophy and art in this way allows us to reread key debates in aesthetic theory and to view art history in a different way. The surrealists, among others, gain in importance. It also invites a new periodization of modern philosophy, and the habitual turn away from Kant’s thing-in-itself towards an increase in philosophical “immanence” is shown to be a false dawn.