Summary

On 28 and 29 May 2009, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) jointly helped organise a symposium titled ‘Dialogues with others: a symposium with Hubert Damisch’, which was aimed at exploring some of the challenges renowned French philosopher and art historian Hubert Damisch has posed to the writing of art history. During the conference, participating scholars from various backgrounds contributed papers in what was a joint effort to develop a dialogue with the different aspects of Damisch’s work. Known for his alternative approach to cultural and/or visual studies, Damisch argues that the ‘paradigm’ or ‘theoretical object’ of art, while remaining attentive to the material specificity of artistic practice, necessarily transverses cultural domains ad infinitum. Stripping Damisch’s work of all its various theoretical layers, the core question it constantly seeks to answer is whether there is a mode of philosophising that requires working ‘as close to art’ as possible, and whether working along or together with it truly ‘works’? Apart from giving scholars the chance to debate and reflect on the various intellectual paradigms wherein Damisch’s approach to art history is to be understood, the symposium also saw the French art historian providing the keynote address himself. Attendees were hereby able to listen, examine and debate several aspects of Damisch’s thoughts in the fields of knowledge (psychoanalysis, structuralism, phenomenology) and media (art, film, photography and architecture) with the renowned intellectual.

Speakers

Hubert Damisch

Contact details

For more information about the symposium ‘Dialogues with others: a symposium with Hubert Damisch’, please contact:

The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
Spuistraat 210 (room 113)
1012 VT Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Email: asca-fgw@uva.nl