ART, POLITICS, AND IMAGINATION

As early as in Phenomenology of Perception, art plays a central role in Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of style, expression, truth, and being. In the Preface, from which the epigraph above is taken, Merleau-Ponty recognizes art as a parallel endeavor to philosophical thinking; both strive to take notice of the nascent sense of a world that is “always ‘already there’,” prior to reflection (lxx). In his final essay, “Eye and Mind,” painting and the plastic arts acquire ontological priority for revealing the intertwining of sensing and sensed, perceiver and perceived. Art, then, not only epitomizes the paradoxical struggle of creative expression. It shares with phenomenology the painstaking task of interrogating the mystery of the world and of reason, an act that requires, first, an infinite investigation of their own methods and guiding assumptions and, second, learning to see the world anew with each reprisal. Although Merleau-Ponty does not make explicit the political power of art thus conceived, as the embodying of a different philosophy that engages in infinite interrogation, art has the potential to denaturalize what otherwise may appear and be felt as necessary ontological structures. It is this power of imaginative variation, i.e., of imagining how things could be otherwise, that Husserl attributed to art, and that Black feminist thinkers like Angela Davis today appeal to for abolitionists projects. This year’s meeting of the IMPC brings together these rich and varied strands of inquiry to think with and beyond Merleau-Ponty’s own contributions on artistic expression, politics, and being, seeking to make explicit the political dimensions of art. Can we find resources in Merleau-Ponty’s thought about the power of art as we collectively work to imagine different futures beyond the neo-liberal, carceral state? 

The conference will consist of one session that will run for three days, with a special performance Thursday evening and a visit to the Villanova University art gallery Friday evening. We are also pleased to confirm this year’s keynote speakers, Professor Jorella Andrews (Professor Emerita in Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London) and Professor Mariana Ortega (Penn State University), as well as invited speakers Helen Fielding (University of Western Ontario), Rajiv Kaushik (Brock University), Qrescent Mali Mason (Haverford University), and David Morris (Concordia University).

This year’s meeting of IMPC will take place in at The Inn at Villanova, in Philadelphia, United States, on the unceded ancestral land of the Lenape people, who lived in this area for thousands of years prior to European colonization. The conference is being co-directed by Martina Ferrari (Villanova University) and Whitney Howell (La Salle University). On-site accommodation is available.

Host or Publisher Martina Ferrari