PHIL 008. First-Year Seminar: Aesthetics and Power

This first-year seminar critically examines the entangled relations between aesthetics and power in order to appraise the capacity of aesthetic experience to establish and reinforce norms, and the potential of aesthetic experience to challenge hegemonic structures of (neo-)liberal modernity in turn. While the philosophical discipline of aesthetics has traditionally confined itself to questions of beauty, judgment, and taste, we will approach “aesthetics” as a fundamentally socially and politically mediated, experiential relationship between the individual and the external world. Some of the themes we will explore might include the relationship between beauty and heteropatriarchy, the culture industry under industrial capitalism, and the aesthetics of embodiment that shape how we understand and move through the world. Our objects of study will comprise philosophical texts from the subdisciplines of critical theory, phenomenology, social and political philosophy, feminist studies, and philosophy of race, which we will read in conversation with a variety of aesthetic productions spanning music, film, performance art, and video games.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Spring 2025. Ahmed.
Catalog chapter: Philosophy
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/philosophy

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