Loading Events

“What can I hope?”: Race, Abyssal Aesthetics, and the Failure of Beauty

Jessica Ruffin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Mon, 11/11 · 4:30 pm6:00 pm · 205 East Pyne

German Department
Limestone deposits along the Tombigbee River in Epes, Alabama

This talk addresses the function of the beautiful in accounts of aesthetic and ethical intersubjectivity. Immanuel Kant’s racialized ideal of human beauty and morality affords an interrogation of colorblind optimism. Engaging the promise of beauty as that of abstraction from the ground of phenomenal experience, I contend with beauty’s failure amidst ongoing histories of racialization and white supremacy. As an alternative to abstraction as transcendence, I turn to Frantz Fanon, Arthur Schopenhauer, and my own embodiment to refigure abstraction as abyssal descent. Jessica Ruffin is Assistant Professor of Film and Media in the Literature Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research and teaching constellate media theory and historiography, German aesthetic traditions, philosophies of race, and auto-philosophical exploration. Her work has been published in New German Critique, qui parle, and Millennium Film Journal. Her current book project, Becoming Amphibious, or the question of ethics in white supremacist worlding is a work of speculative media philosophy, which seeks figures of ethical receptivity capable of undoing white supremacy and racial capitalism worlding environments.

Humanities Council Logo
Italian Studies Logo
American Studies Logo
Humanistic Studies Logo
Ancient World Logo
Canadian Studies Logo
ESC Logo
Journalism Logo
Linguistics Logo
Medieval Studies Logo
Renaissance Logo
Film Studies Logo