Acinemas : Aesthetics and Film in the Philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard

Acinemas : Aesthetics and Film in the Philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard

University of Dundee
7-8 May 2014

This international conference brings together academics from the UK, France, Belgium, Korea, Australia and the US to discuss Jean-François Lyotard's aesthetics and philosophy of film. It responds to the recent publication in bilingual versions of Lyotard's works on art and aesthetics by Leuven University, the recent translation of his most important philosophical work Discourse, Figure (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), and the first-time translation of two of his essays on philosophy and film for this special event. Speakers will address the original contribution made by Lyotard to aesthetics, to the philosophy of art, and to the philosophy of film.

Lyotard's work as an aesthetician was focused on doing justice to the sensual qualities of works of art, in resistance to what he saw as the typical reduction of artworks to intellectual systems. One of the key debates in Lyotard's early work was with Jacques Lacan, whom he believed devalued the sensory and the work of art. Significantly, Lacan has been and remains the most significant theoretical reference in philosophy of film. What is at stake in this project, then, is the question of how a philosophical aesthetics can adequately understand film as an art. Arguably, much philosophical and theoretical engagement with film continues to see it as a neutral medium for the expression of ideas, which need to be interpreted. In contrast, Lyotard's aesthetics of film proposes a reflection on how film works in terms of the economy of the images and sounds of which it is composed. A critical engagement with his work thus promises a new angle of approach to the philosophy of film, which would understand it in terms of a sensorial aesthetics.

This conference has been made possible by funding from the Scots Philosophical Association.

Contributors will include:

Keynote: Jean-Michel Durafour (Université Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3 and the École Normale
Supérieure), author of Jean-François Lyotard: questions au cinema.
Peter W. Milne (Seoul National University)
Keith Crome (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Julie Gaillard (Emory University)
Graham Jones (Monash University)
Mathew Pateman (Kingston University)
Kiff Bamford (Leeds Metropolitan University)
Vlad Ionescu (University of Leuven)
Ashley Woodward (University of Dundee)

Further information will become available on the conference website:
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/humanities/events/lyotard/

Attendance is free. To help us with organization, please indicate your intention to attend. This and all other queries should be emailed to Ashley Woodward: [email protected]