Kant’s Aesthetics and Marxism Talk by Michael Wayne CAMRI Seminar Wed Nov 26, 14:00 University of Westminster Harrow Campus Room A7.01 Registration is possible by e-mail to [email protected] until November 17. http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/research-seminars/kants-aesthetics-and-ma... The contest between a sociology of culture and a philosophy of the aesthetic often resolves itself into an unsatisfactory antinomy between a reduction of the aesthetic to its conditions of production or a transcendence of the aesthetic from those selfsame social conditions. Suspicion of the ideology of the aesthetic has led materialists of various stripes to embrace the former, while an idealist celebration of transcendence has often drawn on Kant’s aesthetic philosophy. In this talk on the subject of his new book 'Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique' (Bloomsbury 2014) Michael Wayne argues that Kant’s aesthetic turn represents a break from the problems which his philosophy encountered in the first and second Critiques. Through the aesthetic Kant begins to develop ideas that will be important to Marxist philosophy, but more importantly can help us think about the specificity and significance of the aesthetic today as a special kind of cognition, with the potential to re-wire our affective responses to the world, expand our imaginations, articulate utopian desires and retain a special connection to our materialist conditions of existence. Michael Wayne is a Professor of Screen Studies at Brunel University. He has written widely on Marxist theory. His books include 'Political Film: the dialectics of Third Cinema' (2001), 'Marxism and Media Studies: Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends' (2003), 'Marx’s Das Kapital For Beginners' (2012) and 'Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique' (2014).