Becoming What One Reads: Post-Theory from Ibn Bajja to Hegel and Beyond
Gregory B. Stone
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA
stone@lsu.edu
Abstract:
This presentation will provide an account of the ancient and medieval “Age of Theory”—the primacy of theoria in Aristotle and medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian neo-Aristotelians—as a prelude to the formulation of a “post-theoretical” relation between human subjects and aesthetic objects. Drawing upon the early 12th-century Andalusian philosopher Ibn Bajja’s critique of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the aim will be to imagine a way of being (or being with) the object of understanding such that the distinction between object and subject no longer pertains. With Averroes, we will see that the locus of such being is the image. Besides ancient and medieval thinkers, the chief intellectual focus will be on Hegel and on Emanuele Coccia’s 2010 book Sensible Life: A Micro-ontology of the Image (particularly, on Coccia’s notion of “Becoming What One Sees”). The overall aim will be to restore life to the aesthetic object itself by avoiding both the doctrine of “art for art’s sake” and the simplistic utilitarian reductions of artworks to veiled political manifestos or broodings on the complexities and tribulations of “identities.” The paper will remain preliminary and suggestive rather than assertive—which is to say that it will not offer any definitive theory.
Gregory B. Stone
Since receiving his PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University in 1989, Gregory B. Stone has taught at Louisiana State University, where he is Joseph S. Yenni Professor of Italian Studies. He has served as Director of the LSU doctoral program in Comparative Literature and as Chair of the Department of French Studies for a combined total of more than twenty years. He has taught a wide array of subjects, including literary theory and criticism, philosophy, Old Occitan, Old French, and Renaissance French Literature, and Italian literature. He regularly teaches an Honors College seminar on Dante’s Commedia. His primary research focus for the past two decades has been the reception and influence of Islamic and Jewish rationalism in European literature at the dawn of the Renaissance. He is the author of The Death of the Troubadour: The Late Medieval Resistance to the Renaissance (1994); The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages: On Boccaccio’s Poetaphysics (1998); Dante’s Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion (2006); and Guido Cavalcanti: Poet of the Rational Animal (2020). He is currently completing a book titled True Images: Dante and the Salvation of Intellect.
