We are embarking on an innovative adaptation of J.P. Sartre’s timeless masterpiece, “No Exit.” Infused with elements inspired by Plato’s Dialogues, our play aims to explore the depths of existentialism, dark absurdity, and musical comedy while delving into the realms of speech and movement improvisation.
Through this innovative production, we aim to challenge and provoke audiences, encouraging deep introspection and dialogue about our existence and the choices we make. We believe that the combination of Sartre’s piercing insights and Plato’s philosophical foundations will create a unique theatrical experience that will resonate with both enthusiasts of classic literature and fans of contemporary performance art.
We are embarking on an innovative adaptation of J.P. Sartre’s timeless masterpiece, “No Exit.” Infused with elements inspired by Plato’s Dialogues, our play aims to explore the depths of existentialism, dark absurdity, and musical comedy while delving into the realms of speech and movement improvisation.
Through this innovative production, we aim to challenge and provoke audiences, encouraging deep introspection and dialogue about our existence and the choices we make. We believe that the combination of Sartre’s piercing insights and Plato’s philosophical foundations will create a unique theatrical experience that will resonate with both enthusiasts of classic literature and fans of contemporary performance art.
We are embarking on an innovative adaptation of J.P. Sartre’s timeless masterpiece, “No Exit.” Infused with elements inspired by Plato’s Dialogues, our play aims to explore the depths of existentialism, dark absurdity, and musical comedy while delving into the realms of speech and movement improvisation.
Through this innovative production, we aim to challenge and provoke audiences, encouraging deep introspection and dialogue about our existence and the choices we make. We believe that the combination of Sartre’s piercing insights and Plato’s philosophical foundations will create a unique theatrical experience that will resonate with both enthusiasts of classic literature and fans of contemporary performance art.
María Lugones theorizes the notion of resistance in terms of the notion of “trespassing,” through which “active subjectivity” has the possibility of problematizing normative practices and redrawing maps of power. In this presentation, I highlight the importance of the aesthesic or the perceptual in Lugones’s view of resistance as developed before her turn to decolonial feminism. In doing so, I point to the manner in which this account of resistance is dependent on a sense of ambiguity inspired by the work of Gloria Anzaldúa. Moreover, I introduce a notion of aesthetic trespassing in connection to the perception of artworks that discloses the intimacy between the perceiver and the perceived.
David Bates, in conversation with Stefanos Geroulano and Joanna Stalnaker
We imagine that we are both in control of and controlled by our bodies—autonomous and yet automatic. This entanglement, according to David W. Bates, emerged in the seventeenth century when humans first built and compared themselves with machines. Reading varied thinkers from Descartes to Kant to Turing, Bates reveals how time and time again technological developments offered new ways to imagine how the body’s automaticity worked alongside the mind’s autonomy. Tracing these evolving lines of thought, David Bates discusses his new book, An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence, which offers a new theorization of the human as a being that is dependent on technology and produces itself as an artificial automaton without a natural, outside origin.
David Bates is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California Berkeley. His research focuses on the history of legal and political ideas, and the relationship between technology, science, and the history of human cognition.
Stefanos Geroulanos is the Director of the Remarque Institute and Professor of European Intellectual History at NYU. He usually writes about concepts that weave together modern understandings of time, the human, and the body. His new book is a history of the concepts, images, and sciences of human origins since 1770, forthcoming from Liveright Press as The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins in 2024.
Joanna Stalnaker is Professor of French at Columbia. She works on Enlightenment philosophy and literature, with a recent interest in how women shaped the Enlightenment. Her new book, The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death, will be published by Yale University Press in the Walpole series.
Presented by the NYC Wittgenstein Workshop
If you will be visiting from outside the New School, email the workshop to inform the security desk.
Room 1101, 6 E 16th St, New York, NY 10003
“There’s no arguing about art” is manifestly false. Art is one of the best things to argue about. The question is why. In this public philosophy debate, Nick Riggle (University of San Diego), Nat Hansen (University of Reading), and Zed Adams (The New School) will face off on the question of why arguing about art matters. At stake are two very different conceptions of public life: a Millian liberal vision which encourages the appreciation of difference and an Emersonian perfectionist vision which aims to converge on a shared conception of the good.
Nick Riggle
Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of San Diego
Nick Riggle is a wannabe chef, a dad, a former professional rollerblader, and a Californian born, raised, and residing philosopher who has published work on style, aesthetic discourse, street art, beauty, and other topics in aesthetics and the philosophy of art.
Nat Hansen
Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of Reading
Nat Hansen is a philosopher who has written about color language, the experimental investigation of meaning, and new wave ordinary language philosophy. He thinks that The Living Daylights is the best James Bond movie.
Zed Adams
Associate Professor of Philosophy
The New School
Zed Adams has the most audio cables of any philosopher he knows. He has written on the philosophy of mind, art, and technology. The Living Daylights is not his favorite Bond film.
September 4 (Wed), 11.45 – 1.15
Alfredo Vernazzani (Ruhr University, Bochum)
Urban Aesthetics, Capabilities, and The Pursuit of Well-Being
September 18 (Wed), 11.45 – 1.15
Antony Aumann (Northern Michigan University)
On Being Transformed by Literature: from Inspiration to Conversion
October 2 (Wed), 11.45 – 1.15
Alex King (Simon Fraser University)
Exquisite Feeling
October 16 (Wed), 11.45 – 1.15
Joe Han (New York University)
Games, Art and The Magic Circle (provisional title)
October 30 (Wed), 11.45 – 1.15
Vanda Metzger (Bergen Community College)
Aesthetics of Ornament
November 6 (Wed), 11.45 – 1.15
Jeffrey Strayer (Purdue University Fort Wayne)
Art and Identity: Nothing, Something, and Everything
November 13 (Wed), 11.45 – 1.15
Laura Di Summa (William Paterson University)
Who’s Reading? Children’s Aesthetics and an Epistemology of Parenting Through Picture Books (provisional title)
November 27 (Wed), 11.45 – 1.15
Francesco Campana (University of Padua – The New School)
Artistic Space as Political Space
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Upon entering the building, non-CUNY attendants will need to show an ordinary ID at the front desk.
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Elisa Caldarola
Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
RTDb
Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences, University of Turin
The Department of German at NYU and Deutsches Haus at NYU present a lecture by Professor Elisabeth Bronfen, who will speak on “Serial Reading as a Hermeneutic Practice,” in which Bronfen will discuss “serial reading” as a way of exploring variations and transformations within a given oeuvre. To do so, she will present the theoretical and methodological underpinning of her newest monograph Shakespeare and his Serial Configurations, which will appear with S. Fischer Verlag early 2025. Bronfen’s aim is, on the one hand, toillustrate what it means to read an oeuvre for the repetition and differences regarding the aesthetic, philosophical, psychological and cultural concerns it addresses for our contemporary moment. On the other hand, her concern is using critical terms taken from Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud and Stanley Cavell to expand on our current discussion of seriality as a theme of and as an ordering principle for critical reading.
To RSVP for in-person attendance, please click here.
About the participant:
Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and, since 2007, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She completed her habilitation at the University of Munich on representations of femininity and death. Her areas of specialization include gender studies, psychoanalysis, visual culture, and television seriality. She published Obsession. The Cultural Critic’s Life in the Kitchen with Rutgers University Press, and Serial Shakespeare. An Infinite Variety of Appropriations in American TV Drama with Manchester University Press. Her debut novel Händler der Geheimnisse appeared with Limmat Verlag in September 2023.
Attendance information:
To RSVP for in-person attendance, please click here.
“Elisabeth Bronfen’s Serial Reading as a Hermeneutic Practice,” is funded by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).
September 4 (Wed), 11.45 – 1.15
Alfredo Vernazzani (Ruhr University, Bochum)
Urban Aesthetics, Capabilities, and The Pursuit of Well-Being
September 18 (Wed), 11.45 – 1.15
Antony Aumann (Northern Michigan University)
On Being Transformed by Literature: from Inspiration to Conversion
October 2 (Wed), 11.45 – 1.15
Alex King (Simon Fraser University)
Exquisite Feeling
October 16 (Wed), 11.45 – 1.15
Joe Han (New York University)
Games, Art and The Magic Circle (provisional title)
October 30 (Wed), 11.45 – 1.15
Vanda Metzger (Bergen Community College)
Aesthetics of Ornament
November 6 (Wed), 11.45 – 1.15
Jeffrey Strayer (Purdue University Fort Wayne)
Art and Identity: Nothing, Something, and Everything
November 13 (Wed), 11.45 – 1.15
Laura Di Summa (William Paterson University)
Who’s Reading? Children’s Aesthetics and an Epistemology of Parenting Through Picture Books (provisional title)
November 27 (Wed), 11.45 – 1.15
Francesco Campana (University of Padua – The New School)
Artistic Space as Political Space
—
Upon entering the building, non-CUNY attendants will need to show an ordinary ID at the front desk.
—
Elisa Caldarola
Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
RTDb
Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences, University of Turin