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Variations on The Great Refusal II
Instructor: Cécile Malaspina
Program: Art & Curatorial Practice, Critical Philosophy
Credit(s): 1
Date: February 15th, 22th, March 1th, 8th.
Time: 09:00-11:30 ET
Enroll – 225 USD

Israel Gaza war protests, 2023.

DESCRIPTION: The first Variations on The Great Refusal Seminar situated this notion in the speculative aesthetics of Alfred North Whitehead and in Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. This Seminar proposes the idea of great refusal as a lens through which to look at the nature of aesthetic achievement in contemporary artistic practices and the ethical commitment by intellectuals. In this second edition of the Great Refusal Seminar, an outstanding contemporary filmmaker, curator and sociologist will reflect on the idea of the great refusal in relation to ‘aesthetic achievement,’ not as an ‘other’ to reason, but rather as requiring the intellectual courage to grant reason the exercise of its full rights. They will chart their own trajectory in navigating the great refusal in the context of the highly fraught public discourse about Israel and Palestine.

Dante Alighieri first introduces the idea of ‘great refusal’ into the Western literary canon in his Divine Comedy (1321). Here, the ‘shade’ who commits the great refusal is emblematic of those who err eternally in the antechamber of hell in pursuit of the banner of conformity. Whitehead famously revives the notion of the great refusal as the mark of intellectual cowardice, namely, as the refusal to grant reason the exercise of its full rights. However, he also defines the great refusal in diametrically opposite terms as the hallmark of aesthetic achievement!

It is in this second sense as aesthetic achievement that the great refusal has entered the vocabulary of 20th emancipatory movements via Herbert Marcuse as a rallying cry for emancipation against oppression and injustice. Dante’s great refusal has thus ultimately become the legacy of the exiled poet’s intellectual and aesthetic courage, namely, his refusal to be cowed by self-doubt and his courage to place the rank and file of his powerful contemporaries in the Divine Comedy’s Hell.

In this Seminar, we will hear from those who have entered the fray of a highly polarized public discourse through a courageous act of refusal – a refusal of censorship and a refusal of injunctions against the exercise, by reason, of its full rights.

The Seminar allows us to tune into the intellectual sensitivity we inherit from thinkers such as Dante, Whitehead and Marcuse. We will take abreast of the problematic nature of inner conflicts that great refusals imply: undecidability and self-deliberation. To look at contemporary art through this prism allows us to regain the means of complexity.

Speakers: Award wining filmmaker and journalist, Cherine Yasbeck; Galit Eliat, curator and director of the Meduza Foundation; Ashjan Ajour, sociologist, author of the award winning book Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger strikes: Political Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body (Palgrave 2021); Cécile Malaspina, philosopher & programmer at The New Centre for Research and Practice, author of An Epistemology of Noise (Bloomsbury 2018)

IMAGE: Israel Gaza war protests, 2023.

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Enroll – 225 USD