Online Discussion / “The Philosophical Trope of ‘Homelessness’ and the Question of Ethics,” with Cecilia Sjöholm and Sven-Olov Wallenstein

Tuesday, 3 November 2020, 12:30–1:30 pm Eastern Standard Time / 6:30–7:30 pm Central European Time
Venue: Online via Zoom. Please register here.
Moderated by Joanna Warsza and Sina Najafi
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition “And Warren Niesłuchowski Was There”

In one of his fragments, Novalis wrote, “Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere.” Some 150 years later, Theodor Adorno would instead propose that “ethics today means not being at home in one’s house.” Examining a number of philosophers’ perspectives on the fundamental estrangement of the modern subject, Sjöholm and Wallenstein will discuss the post-Enlightenment trajectory of an idea that continues to be of crucial importance for how Western societies today imagine citizenship and belonging. Q&A to follow for those attending on Zoom.

About the Participants
Cecilia Sjöholm is a professor of aesthetics at Södertörn University, Stockholm. Her books include The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire (Stanford University Press, 2004), Kristeva and the Political (Routledge, 2005), and Doings Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things (Columbia University Press, 2015). She is currently working on a project on images in Descartes’s philosophy.

Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet magazine. He is the co-editor, with Joanna Warsza, of And Warren Niesłuchowski Was There: Ontological Nomad, Guest, Host, Ghost (Cabinet Books and Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, 2020), published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name.

Sven-Olov Wallenstein is a professor of philosophy at Södertörn University, Stockholm. Recent publications include Spacing Philosophy: Lyotard and the Idea of the Exhibition (with Daniel Birnbaum; Sternberg Press 2019) and Adorno: Negativ dialektik och estetisk teori (Glänta Produktion, 2019). Critical Theory: Past, Present, Future, co-edited with Anders Bartonek, will be published in late 2020 by Södertörn University Press.

Joanna Warsza is a program director of CuratorLab at Konstfack University of Arts in Stockholm and an independent curator interested in how art functions politically and socially outside the white cube. She was the artistic director of Public Art Munich 2018 and curator of the Georgian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Recent publications include Red Love. A Reader on Alexandra Kollontai (co-edited with Maria Lind and Michele Masucci; Sternberg Press, Konstfack Collections, and Tensta Konsthall, 2020), and And Warren Niesłuchowski Was There: Ontological Nomad, Guest, Host, Ghost (co-edited with Sina Najafi; Cabinet Books and Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, 2020).