workshop

Elke Van Campenhout Who’s Afraid of the Subject?

18-22 January 2016 / a.pass

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In this theoretical and discussion workshop, we reconsider the notion of the subject today:

why, after all the turn-arounds of becomings, vibrant objects and a decentralisation of the human perspective, do we need to reconsider the subject as an important player in our discourses and practice?

well, to start with, because there is no personal agency or ethics without it. and also because there is a need for a consciousness of what it is that subjects us, what it is that turns us into speaking, experiencing and affecting human beings. but even more so, when and why these powers are denied to us, and why? if we consider the subject as being constructed by what it is subjected to, it is important to see ‘reality’ for what it is. in the sense of: what it is doing to us. if we consider, on the other hand, the subject as the basis position out of which an action-on-the world, or with-the-world, takes off, it is the basic premisse to be able to (re)think the public as a place of togetherness, the construction of a ‘we’, and the starting point for our commonal ethics.

we talk our way through these thoughts, focussing more specifically on the artist subject, and diving into foucault’s ‘care of the self’, developing through the week into the theories of agamben and judith butler.