Aesth-ethics: Art as Hospitality

It was the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who identified Ethics with unconditional Hospitality to the Other. The course will track this concept-which-is-not-a-concept of Hospitality in the thought of Levinas, Derrida, Sartre, and Agamben. This will lead to the displacement of the locus of event of Hospitality from the sociological sphere to the aesthetic sphere of art. Art will thus be re-examined as a site of the appearance of radical Alterity, alien to any calculation and economization. This novel approach to art will be implemented in the discussion of artworks of Josef Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Jeff Wall, Sigalit Landau, Deganit Berest, and others.