The 2024 International Summer School on Philosophy of Art
2024. 7. 1 - 7.5
Hosted by: Department of Philosophy of Art, School of Philosophy,
Office of Academic Affairs, Fudan University
Supported by: Fuson Art Center, Shanghai
Mimesis is one of the most ancient, fertile and yet misunderstood concepts of western philosophy and aesthetics. From Plato to Derrida, Auerbach to Adorno, Flemish illusionistic paintings to photography and cinema in the age of mechanical reproduction, human beings never cease creating impassioned doubles of themselves and of the world. As mimetic creatures, we desire to achieve resemblance between the specter of identity and difference. Can we then speak of a mimetic drive (in the manner of Girard)? Is there a mimetic faculty (according to Benjamin)? What does it mean to be fundamentally mimetic creatures, as Plato and Aristotle both agree that we are, vindicated by recent cognitive researches in the so-called “mimetic turn”? In the Greek modernity of the fifth and fourth century, mimesis was born as the nemesis of philosophy. Plato insists that as imitation, the copy is ontologically inferior to the Idea. This Platonic hierarchy has since been elaborated and extended, questioned and challenged, supplemented and subverted. Adorno goes so far as to detect the quasi-fascistic tendency inherent in the mimetic drive. Why and if yes, in what ways is mimesis dangerous? Should human beings put a leash upon their mimetic drives at all? Where does it lead us and where do we want to be led by mimesis? Does it still make sense to use mimesis as an operative category for arts and art theories? What can mimesis tell us about the nature of the image? In the International Summer School on Mimesis, hosted by the Department of Philosophy of Art at Fudan University, we will explore these questions with acclaimed scholars from abroad and China.
In the 2024 International Summer School on Philosphy of Art, hosted by School of Philosophy and Academic Affairs Office at Fudan University, speakers and students from all over the world will join in a 5-day summer offline program on the concepts and praxes of mimesis, undergraduate and graduate students are welcome to apply. In the summer school, students will learn the many facets and depths of this founding concept of western philosophy and western art. Through lectures, seminars and special mentorship programs, they will have the opportunity to foster a genuine, in-depth and extended relationship with the faculty to achieve a more rewarding learning experience. Leading by Fuson Art Center, the various art museums and the vibrant cultural scenes in the city of Shanghai will provide excellent sites for the test and contestation of ideas.
Time
July 1-July 5, 2024 (Registration: June 30)
Location
School of Philosophy, Fudan University
No. 220 Handan Road, Shanghai, China
Languages
English, Chinese
I. Course Schedule
II. Speakers
Bracha L.Ettinger
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger is an artist, philosopher and psychoanalyst. She is currently the Chair and Professor of Art & Psychoanalysis at European Graduate School and a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at GCAS. During the 1980s, she invented the ‘matrixial’ theory and coined its major concepts including ‘matrixial gaze’, ‘matrixial space’, ‘matrixial transference’, ‘copoiesis’, ‘transsubjectivity’ and ‘metramorphosis’, she has consistently developed this feminine-maternal dimension ever since in the fields of aesthetics and ethics in art and in psychoanalysis. Her representative works include The Matrixial Gaze: Feminist Arts & Histories Network and Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics.
Seminar Reading Materials:
1） The Matrixial Gaze (1994) Feminist Arts & Histories Network – Dept. of Fine Art, Leeds University (1995)
2） Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics. Vol 1: 1990-2000. Selected papers edited with Introduction by Griselda Pollock. Pelgrave Macmillan 2020
3） And My Heart, Wound-Space With-in Me. The Space of Carriance, And My Heart Wound-Space. 14th Istanbul Biennial. Leeds: Wild Pansy Press (2015)
Hanneke Grootenboer (University of Amsterdam, online)
Hanneke Grootenboer is a professor of Early Modern Art and Visual Culture at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam, she received her doctorate from the University of Rochester in 2001. She lectured at Columbia University, the UvA and the Jan van Eyck Academy before joining the University of Oxford, where she became Full Professor in 2014. At Oxford, she served as Head of the Ruskin School of Art from 2014 till 2016. She is the recipient of various fellowships, including from the Netherlands Institute for Advance Study (NIAS), the Clark Art Institute and the Leverhulme Foundation. In 2021, she delivered the Erasmus Lectures at Harvard University. From 2019 to 2024, Grootenboer was Professor of Art History at Radboud University.Grootenboer’s publications include The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting (UP Chicago, 2005) and Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Eighteenth-Century British Eye Miniatures (UP Chicago, 2012). In 2022, Grootenboer won the Outstanding Monograph Prize of the American Association of Aesthetics for her book The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking (UP Chicago, 2021).
Mingjun Lu
Mingjun Lu is a researcher and curator at the department of Philosophy, Fudan University, and deputy director of the Department of Art and Philosophy at Fudan University. He received his PhD in art history at Sichuan University. His main research fields include: contemporary art criticism, curatorial practice and modern Chinese art history. His representative books include: The Poetics of the Gaze: Perception-Politics-Time, Art Transformation and Modern China: The Radical Roots of Chinese Contemporary Art. He has published a number of essays in Literature and Art Studies, Art Studies, Twenty-First Century and other journals. In recent years, he has curated Borderland: Topography of Geography (2017-2018), In Gathering (2019), River Without Beacon, 1979 (2019) , Street Corners, Squares and Montages (2019), Muses, Fools and Compasses (2020) and other exhibitions.
Reading Materials:
1) Potentiality: A Treatise on Effectiveness（La Propension des choses）,François Jullien (Volume 1, Chapter 1, Volume 2, Chapter 3, Volume 3, Conclusion)
2) The Idea of Qi: The Development of Chinese Concepts of Nature and Man, Seiichi Onozawa (Part IV)
3) A New Interpretation of the Theory of Qi and the Three Systems of the Song and Ming Confucians, Chen Rongzhuo (Chapter 2, Qi and Force)
4) Force and Exchange Patterns, Pedro Sekiya(Preface, Part I: Force from Exchange, Part IV: The Science of Socialism 3)
5) Examination of the Interpretation of Eastern and Western Fine Arts, Shao Hong (Chapter 11: Examination of Western Translations of Qi and Rhyme)
Klaus Mladek
Klaus Mladek is Associate Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on 18th through 20th-century political theory, philosophy, theater, performance studies, affect theory and psychoanalysis. In the book A Politics of Melancholia: From Plato to Arendt (Princeton University Press 2023), he and George Edmondson explore an affirmative mode of melancholic politics. He edited Sovereignty in Ruins: A Politics of Crisis (Duke University Press 2017) with George Edmondson, a collection about the collapse and resurgence of the sovereign exception in our times. He is currently completing a monograph Walter Benjamin's Demons: Revolution and the Idea of Justice. Recent articles and book chapters are on Kafka and the theater, on conspiracy theory, justice and conflict, on populism, the politics of crisis, torture and shame, on melancholic politics, on the American jury system and on the idea of justice in Walter Benjamin.
Seminar Reading Materials:
1）Plato's Republic 376a-403 c and 603a-609c
2）Doctrine of the Similar, Walter Benjamin (2: 694-698) and On Mimetic Faculty (2: 720-722)
3）What is Epic Theater?, Walter Benjamin (version 1 and 2). The best translation of the Brecht essay is in Understanding Brecht (Ed. and Intro by Stanley Mitchell), p. 1-22.
Weijia Wang
Wang graduated from the University of Leuve in Belgium (Dutch), with a PhD in Philosophy in 2018. He is currently an associate professor at the Department of Philosophy of Art, School of Philosophy, Fudan University. His main research areas are: philosophy of Kant, especially aesthetics and philosophy of art. Representative books include: The Beautiful and the Sublime: A Critique of Kant's Aesthetic Judgement , Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore, 2020, Kant on the Formation of Empirical Concepts, Kant 's Mathematical Sublime: The Absolutely Great in Aesthetic Estimation.
Reading Material:
Critique of Judgement, Immanuel Kant, translated by Li Qiuzuo, People's University of China Press, 2011, sections 43-54
Kejun Xia
Xia Kejun is a philosopher, art critic, and curator. He received his PhD from Wuhan University，and pursued his studies at the University of Freiburg in Germany and the University of Strasbourg in France, and studied with Jean-Luc Nancy, then as Visiting Professor in Free University of Berlin (Department of Philosophy 2023.Currently, he holds the position of Professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Renmin University of China in Beijing. With a prolific career, he has authored more than a dozen works, all centered around the key concept of Useless. Notable titles include A Waiting and Useless Nation – Zhuangzi and Heidegger's Second Turn, Useless Theology - Benjamin, Heidegger, and Derrida, Useless Literature - Kafka and China, and “Rest-Gelassen and Pure Paradox.”
Seminar Reading Materials:
1) Essay of Extended Difference in French, Derrida, The Edge of Philosophy
2) Essay of Writing and Difference, Freud and the Writing Arena and From Finite Economics to General Economic Theory: an Unreserved Hegelianism, Derrida.
3) “Le concept et la vie”, Georges Canguilhem, 1968
4) On Life and Death, Derrida, 1975-76 course, Commercial Press, 2024.
5) The Logic of Life: A History of Genetics, Jacobs, Hunan Science and Technology Press, 2021.
6) Leeway and Unccanny - Restart of World Philosophy, Xia Kejun, Nanjing University Press, 2024.
Mingfeng Yu (Associate Professor of Philosophy and translator of Nietzsche, Tongji University)
Yu Mingfeng is an associate Professor of the College of Humanities, Tongji University, Deputy Director of the Institute of European Thought and Culture, a member of the Chinese Society for the History of Foreign Philosophy and a member of the German Philosophy Committee in China. His main research fields are German philosophy, political philosophy and philosophy of art. He is the author of Reduction and Infinity (2022). Translations include Nietzsche's Antichrist, Art and Philosophy in the Age of Tragedy (co-translated); Heidegger's From the Experience of Thoughts (co- translated), Identity and Difference (co-translated); Heinrich Meier's What is Nietzsche's Zarathustra, The Challenges of Political Philosophy and the Religion of Revelation, and The Lessons of Carl Schmitt (co-translated), etc.
Seminar Reading Materials:
1) The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche, The Commercial Press (first ten chapters)
2) Nietzsche on Art and Life, Daniel Came (ed.), Oxford
3) What is German Music, Eric Bochmeyer, The Commercial Press (chapter on Nietzsche and Wagner)
4) Wagner and Philosophy, Brian Magee, China Friendship Publishing Company (Chapters 6-13)
Shuangli Zhang
Zhang Shuangli is the Dean and Professor of the School of Philosophy, Fudan University, Deputy Director of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Foreign Marxism at Fudan University (Key Research Base for Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education), selected for the National Talent Plan. He is also the executive director of the Society for the History of Marxist Philosophy, the executive director and vice president of the Society for Foreign Marxism, and the executive director of the Shanghai Philosophical Society. He mainly researches on the ideas of Marx's classic works, the basic theories of Western Marxism, and the frontier development of contemporary foreign Marxism.
III. Admission Requirement
1) Eligibility
Undergraduate and graduate students in philosophy, art history or relevant majors are welcome to apply.
2) Number of Participants
50 Participants
3) Tuitions & Fees
The summer school is free of tuition fee, students need to cover their own traveling, accommodation and meals expenses.
4) Scholarship
The summer school program will select 5 outstanding participants and offer scholarships to cover parts in traveling, accommodation and meals expenses. The selection will comprehend students’ summer school performance and final assignment.
5) Others
The Academic Affairs Office of Fudan University and School of Philosophy of Fudan University will grant study certificate for students with full attendance.
IV. Application Materials
1）A sample of personal scholarly paper
2）Scan of applicant’s ID card/Passport and student id card of current university
2）Applicant’s CV including research interests, education experience etc.
V. Key Date
Applicants need to send all the materials in electronic form to yj_yang@fudan.edu.cn, before 24:00 on 16 June, 2024, with an edited title as “Full Name + University + Apply for Summer School”.
VI. Contact
YANG
Tel：+86 21 65642732
Email：yj_yang@fudan.edu.cn
WU
Email：wu_yi@fudan.edu.cn
(END)
Presented by Fudan University Media Center
Source: School of Philosophy, Fudan University
