Politics, Affiliation and the Philosophy of Friendship
June 28-July 16, 2021
In the era of the pandemic, which has foregrounded isolation and technologies of remote nearness, as well as the ongoing crisis of racial injustice, it is all the more important to consider what affiliation and friendship mean. For two weeks this summer, the School of Visual Arts in New York City and the HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden will collaborate for a rigorous inquiry into politics, affiliation and the philosophy of friendship.
Considerations regarding what friendship is and means across individual, collective and societal registers, in respect of both cooperative and antagonistic entanglements, have complex and multiple histories. Some would argue that these must be understood in order to realize an engaged ethical life that takes account of principles of affiliation in their diverse expressions as: love, familial affection, extra-familial affection, fidelity, loyalty, consensus, goodwill, recognition, sameness and difference, oppression and freedom, and the intimate opacities of relationality.
Here we will consider the politics and ontology of friendship, the metaphysics of togetherness and agency, and survey the apparatus of support structures within the spectrum of filial relations as they are entwined with gender, race and governmentality.
The intensive will engage the question of the friend across discourses, as it is activated across different constituencies. Points of reference include Hegel’s formulation of self-overcoming, mutuality in otherness and relational freedom; Carl Schmitt’s friend/enemy dichotomy; Virginia Woolf’s challenge to patriarchal representations of friendship; and Sibyl Schwarzenbach’s formal political discourse on friendship as a feminist political strategy, among other key terms and texts.
Participants will be selected from across disparate yet intersecting fields of practice, including art, philosophy, design, activism and curatorial practice. Through lectures, seminars, guest speakers and collaborative projects, participants will develop a contemporary framework for thinking through friendship in this unprecedented era.
The seminar will be led jointly by Steven Henry Madoff, founding chair, MA Curatorial Practice department, School of Visual Arts, and Mick Wilson, Professor of Art and Director of Studies for Research Education, at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg.
Among our guest speakers will be the internationally renowned philosophers, scholars, artists, writers, and curators Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy, the New School for Social Research; Yuk Hui, Associate Professor, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong; Walter Mignolo, William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, Duke University; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Columbia University; Sybil A. Schwarzenbach, professor emeritus of philosophy and women's studies, City University of New York; Céline Condorelli, artist and writer, London, including the books Support Structures and Notes on Friendship; Irish artist Sarah Pierce; and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, member of the Raqs Media Collective, Delhi.