Annual theme “Human after Man“

Interdisciplinary Lecture Series (WS 2018/19)

 

6 November 2018, 7:00 pm

The Co/Sympoetic Human

Bracha Ettinger, Kathrin Thiele

 

Bracha L. Ettinger is an influential artist-painter and artist-theorist, philosopher and supervising psychoanalyst, whose pioneering work has emerged during the 1990s and caused major transformations in the fields of contemporary European painting as well as in philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical studies, art theory and history, film and literary studies and feminism. Based in Paris and Tel Aviv, her art, both abstract and symbolic, is a research of depth and colour as light, and of archival traces of trauma, which engages with historical and personal memory in relation to women in war, oblivion and witnessing. Ettinger is the Marcel Duchamp Chair and Professor of Psychoanalysis and Art at the European Graduate School and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at GCAS College Dublin. She is one of the leading theorists in the realm of contemporary French philosophy and psychoanalysis. Her matrixial theory offers a metaphysical paradigm for rethinking subjectivity, transjectivity and femininity. She considers her approach as metafeminism. Her artworks, mainly paintings, drawings, artist's notebooks, and photographs, have been presented at exhibitions worldwide at major museums of contemporary art and have been the subject of several books. Her most recent solo shows were at the Silesian Museum in Katowice (2017) and at UB Anderson Gallery, Buffalo (2018), and she participates next in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018-2019). Amongst her own publications are And My Heart Wound-Space published on the occasion of the 14th Istanbul Biennial, 2015 (a monograph that includes 4 of her essays, early and recent, and reproductions of her artworks) and a collection of her essays published under the title The Matrixial Borderspace (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). A reader of her selected essays in two volumes is currently in print with Palgrave-Macmillan (ed. Griselda Pollock).

 

Kathrin Thiele

 

Kathrin Thiele is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. Trained in gender studies, sociology, literary studies and critical theory, her research focuses on questions of ethics and politics from queer feminist, decolonial and posthuman(ist) perspectives. With specific attention to questions of relationality, implicatedness and ontological entanglements, her writing intervenes in contemporary feminist debates around (sexual) differences, de/coloniality and new materialism/posthumanisms. She thinks with contemporary queer, feminist and decolonial approaches to explicate both promising theoretical potential and pressing ethico-political challenges of a feminist different difference. She currently investigates the complexity and non-innocence of critical claims that stress relationality and entanglement as primary to contemporary planetary existence from a feminist philosophical perspective (forthcoming). Together with Birgit M. Kaiser she is founder and coordinator of the research network Terra Critica: Interdisciplinary Network for the Critical Humanities (terracritica.net). Amongst her recent publications are Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture (edited with Rosemarie Buikema and Liedeke Plate, Routledge 2018).