ART 587a, The Non-Human
This course provides a speculative and nonlinear body of collaborative research on expanding definitions of human life, bodies, and politics as produced by the existing models made by artists and theorists. Key in our research will be the proposals on the nature of humanness that challenge its received expectations. Examples could be: the human that is driven toward a wish for death, the body as liberated in combination with machines, the importance of the animal as an aspect of humanity hidden from culture, the inflation of humanity in collective imagination as supermen or as city in revolution, and the critique of normal behaviors as an opportunity for re-generation. The instructor claims no expertise in any aspect of the common dream that occupies the central texts and objects we will examine together.
The course will be structured around weekly readings and discussion. In class lectures and presentations will be shared between instructor and students in the form of performance, meals, arguments and spatial phantasm. Students are required to do weekly reading; write short texts on topics related to our discussion and produce one presentation to the class. Doug Ashford.
Kaja Silverman: Flesh of My Flesh, Orpheus Rex
Sigmund Freud : Beyond the Pleasure principle
Ovid: Metamorphoses
Baudelaire: Anywhere Out of the World
Lee Edelman: No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
Roland Barthes: The Neutral
The Situationist International
Guy Hocquenghem: The Screwball Asses
Sexuality and Space: Beatriz Colomina
Phantasmagoria: Marina Warner
Claude Levi Strauss: The Savage Mind
Freidrich Nietzsche: The Will to Power; Human, All to Human
Donna Haraway: When Species Meet (Posthumanities)
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