U.S. Intellectual History Blog

Walter Benn Michaels on Affect, Aesthetics, Politics

This Friday, April 25, Walter Benn Michaels will be giving a talk at Southern Methodist University (3-5 p.m.).  Michaels will be speaking on the subject of aesthetics and politics.  The event has been organized by the Thinking With Affect Research Cluster, an interdisciplinary group of scholars in the Dallas-Fort Worth area who are interested in exploring the implications of the “affective turn” for thinking about “the social, the political, the cultural, and the scientific.”

Benn MichaelsMichaels’s talk, “Formal Feelings: An Aesthetics and a Politics of Indifference,” will address the relations between the aesthetic and the political, positing “two different views of what makes good art and two different views of what makes good politics.”  I suspect that there will be a very lively Q&A following the lecture.

I plan to write about the talk for the blog on Saturday.  In the meantime, if you are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, I encourage you to attend.

More details about the event can be found here:

Formal Feelings: An Aesthetics and a Politics of Indifference