Howard Caygill: Planetary Aesthetics

This lecture is from the ‪@idsva‬ year-long symposium: On the Anthropocene: Either/Or, with lectures by renowned theorists and philosophers. The symposium addresses the role of art and philosophy in relation to questions of ecology, climate change, co-existence, and sustainability as an existential urgency of our times.
Caygill discusses the conditions for the construction of the Earth as an aesthetic object and the emergence of a critical planetary aesthetic theory and practice in the 21st century. Beginning with Kant's equivocation regarding the aesthetic in the first critique, the lecture critically discusses the work of Jacob Darwin Hamblin and Thomas Nail and proposes a contemporary planetary aesthetics oriented with respect to an elemental synechis.
Howard Caygill is Professor of Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Visual Culture at IDSVA. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including A Kant Dictionary; Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience; On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance; Kafka: In Light of the Accident, and most recently Force and Understanding: Writings on Philosophy and Resistance. He is currently working on the philosophy and aesthetics of the Anthropocene and the role of philosophy in curating and interpreting the art produced by inmates of mental hospitals during the first half of the Twentieth Century.