Forum Lectures #7: David Lloyd

What Comes after Representation?

Abstract

Late Enlightenment discourse on aesthetic experience proposes a decisive account of the conditions of possibility for universal human subjecthood. The aesthetic forges a powerful “racial regime of representation” whose genealogy runs from enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Schiller to late modernist critics like Adorno and Benjamin. For aesthetic philosophy, representation is not just about depiction of diverse humans or inclusion in political or cultural institutions. It is an activity that undergirds the various spheres of human practice and theory, from the most fundamental acts of perception and reflection to the relation of the subject to the political, the economic, and the social. The lecture will address first the outlines of the argument of Under Representation, focusing on elucidating what the book terms the “narrative of representation” that organizes both aesthetic and racial thinking and concluding with some speculative reflections about the aporia with which the book seems to end, that is, what art and what subject can come after representation that might mark a decisive break with the terms in which that concept has been understood?

David Lloyd’s lecture opens the three-day symposium” The subject of art criticism’s universalism,” 25-27 May 2021. The symposium departs from an interpretation of the practice of art criticism as part and parcel of a euro-modernist paradigm that seems capable of reinventing itself no matter what kind of crisis it confronts. With an enquiry into the constitution of the critical subject, the symposium aims at setting an analysis of the historical development and present crisis of art criticism in motion. Read more about it here.

About David Lloyd

David Lloyd, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, is a poet, playwright and critic, working primarily on Irish culture and on postcolonial and cultural theory. His most recent critical books include Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre (2016) and Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (2019). Poetry collections include Arc & Sill: Poems 1979-2009 (2012); Bar Null (2019) and Furrow Archive (2019). His play, The Press/Le Placard is available in a bilingual edition from Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2018.

Forum Lectures

Forum Lectures is a series of lectures by Danish and international thinkers and cultural workers reflecting on how art co-forms communality. FORUM LECTURES brings thinking and shared study back to the university and invites for public lectures the last Tuesday every month at 17:00 - 19:00.

The initiative is hosted by the research group of the New Carlsberg Foundation research center Art as Forum. Our researchers are occupied by a.o. the infrastructures of the arts, collective modes of production, the entanglement of political theory and aesthetic theory, assembling strategies of curation, dematerialized art, acts of strategic separatism and temporality in digital art.

We hope to accommodate live lectures in a near future. However, the lecture by David Lloyd (50 min + Q&A) will be streamed online.

The lecture is open for everyone interested and takes place via Zoom.