Protesting everything that beauty is not OR, ‘Why is the world so beautiful? | Philosophy & Religion

Protesting everything that beauty is not OR, ‘Why is the world so beautiful?

ENV 120 @ 3:00 p.m
Event Date: 
Friday, November 5, 2021 - 15:00

In this text, I offer a characterization of a paradoxical conception of beauty as the condition of the world that we nevertheless need to tend to. As a point of departure, I look at Robin Wall Kimmerer's wonder at the beauty of the world and Édouard Glissant's reflections on Tout-Monde and Mondialité. In particular, I attend to the fundamental character that beauty acquires in Glissant's latter thought. For him, beauty constitutes both the convergence of all world's differences (totality), and a moment/space of aspiration and premonition of this totality that we ought to actualize (in art, for example), and without which the convergence and interconnectedness of the world is threatened. According to Glissant in some of his last works, and in a series of manifestos written at the end of his life with the also Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, at the heart of the contemporary threat to beauty is noise, in its multiple manifestations: racist walls, ministries and offices of immigration, the One, the Identical, an imposed absence of history, the erasure of peoples, languages, cultures, etc. I reconstruct this notion of noise in relation to coloniality, focusing on how we can conceive of a resistance to this imposed uniformity of the world and the fostering of our search of beauty. How do we attune ourselves to the world's connectedness? How to follow the demand to know the world in all its complexity and contradiction?

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