Third Session of the ASCA Film and Philosophy seminar 2022-2023: Restlessness and Intimacy

Organizers: Monique Roelofs, Sudeep Dasgupta, Patricia Pisters, Pınar Türer | Dates: Thursdays 15.00 – 18.00: 16 March 2023, 13 April 2023 | Location: 16 March: Buzzhouse (BG5)

After last year’s focus on Aesthetics of Contingency, the Film and Philosophy seminar returns in the new academic year by zooming in on a more specific form of contingency, which is inspired by a sense of restlessness, disquiet and feelings of disturbance, uncertainty and simmering anxiety in general. Film and philosophy have provided rich engagements with, and provocations and arguments for understanding the self-world relationship through notions of intimacy and uncertainty/disquiet. While disquiet and restlessness are clearly connected to the multiple crises in the world, we propose to relate these crises through a specific focus on the more personal and subjective dimensions of restlessness, through engagements with intimacy, affect, (urban) erotics and related concepts.

Moderated by Pınar Türer and expanding on the year’s theme “Restlessness and Intimacy”, this session will revolve around concepts of fragility, vulnerability, and their link to intimacies in relation to questions of (social and political) change. We will engage with feminist theories on vulnerability, affect, kinaesthetic and temporal experience of trauma, and more, and consider what it could mean to exist in restless times, intimately. Next to our textual engagements, we will discuss Nicolás Grandi and Lata Mani’s “videocontemplation” film The Poetics of Fragility (2016), and examine the poetics and politics of uncertainty, attention, attunement, and compassion, while questioning the motions of restlessness.

Readings:

• Erinn C. Gilson, “Vulnerability Beyond Opposition,” Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice (2014), pp. 138-158
• Alphonso Lingis, "Our Uncertain Compassion," The Alphonso Lingis Reader (2018), pp. 391-398
• Carolyn Pedwell, “Affective Habits,” Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (2021), pp. 28-56
• Alberica Bazzoni, "Reduction in Time: Kinaesthetic and Traumatic Experiences of the Present in Literary Texts," The Case for Reduction, pp. 191-212.

Film:

• Lata Mani & Nicolás Grandi, The Poetics of Fragility (2016)

Date & Time: Thursday March 16, 15.00-18.00

Location: Buzzhouse (BG5), for directions please see the website

If you want to join the seminar and receive the readings, please email:  asca.filmphilosophy@gmail.com

All information can also be found here: https://asca.uva.nl/programme/seminars/film-and-philosophy/film-and-philosophy.html