Seminar For an erotic of artistic practice

At the end of her essay Against Interpretation (1964), Susan Sontag wrote: “Instead of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art.” She was then referring, first of all, to an erotics of reception, which gave rise to the proposal of a “loving critique.” Today, it is not only reception that is affected by discourses that constrain aesthetic enjoyment, but the practice itself that sees desire repressed. The desire for emancipation is always in solidarity with the desire for creation. But when discourses appropriate desire and penetrate the practice of art reduced to an adapted version, or worse still, as a bureaucratized option of political correctness, they produce something very similar to the asphyxiation of interpretation, now converted into a suffocation of production or doing. Thus, paraphrasing Sontag, one could write: instead of a theoretical framework, we need an erotics of practice. The proposal of this seminar is to return to that claim and investigate its possible implications.

The cycle consists of three conferences and three complementary case studies. Each of the six modules has an autonomous foundation and you can freely attend any of the sessions. But it can also function as a thinking seminar on the topic, for which it would be highly recommended to read or view some of the materials in advance.

Tuesday 18. Release desire. Art and eroticism: intersections and parallels.

An erotics of practice is not incompatible with a commitment to transformation and radicality. Following Cecilia Vicuña's slogan for “a warm and erotic socialism”, we will try to explore the parallels and solidarities between artistic desire and revolutionary desire, addressing the ideas of Eros as lack or excess, seduction and vibration, work and play.

Wednesday 19. About negativity: drive and disobedience.

The defense of the erotic dimension and the ludic dimension of art is sterile conceived in mere positivity. Well, in this positivity, the artistic figure would be identified with a pejorative simplification of the intuitive, unconscious, irresponsible and narcissistic being. Different colloquial meanings of the negative will be put in tension with the tradition of negative dialectics.

Thursday 20. Poetics of immanence: the knowledge of the body archaic.

Desire is not transparent, we do not always know what we want and sometimes our desires go against our will, they can surprise us, even alarm us. Something similar happens with poetic creation. Any attempt to make it transparent is a betrayal of the immanent dimension of artistic practice, inseparable from the body in its double dimension of the linguistic body (crossed by translations and their limits) and the archaic body (crossed by animality, matter and its memories).