In 2010 the Institute joined forces with Lorena Rivero de Beer in starting up the Politics and Aesthetics Reading Group.
The group meets once a month.
The Politics and Aesthetics Reading Group responds to a desire to create a space that supports our effort to read philosophical/political theory outside academic environments and develop our critical thinking. The group is directed to people interested in exploring the complex relationship between art/aesthetics and politics.
2012 saw the group engage with Herbert Marcuse’s ‘An Essay on Liberation’, Primo Levi’s ‘If This is A Man’ and Donna Haraway’s ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’.
Late May, we spent at Plas Caerdeon in Wales celebrating Gary’s 40th Birthday, with short performances about ageing, fish and chips on Barmouth Beach and some fireworks.
The Politics and Aesthetics Reading Group has naturally reached to the end of its cycle in 2012. A number of other reading groups have appeared since that the members are a part of, most notably Marx’s Capital Reading Groups and the Free University of Liverpool reading groups, which have taken on Jacques Ranciere’s “The Ignorant Schoolmaster‘, Emmanuel Levinas’s ‘Totality and Infinity’ and are currently watching Gilles Deleuze’s ‘From A to Z’.
List of the Politics and Aesthetics Reading Group sessions:
2010
The Distribution of the Sensible by Jacques Ranciere
The Coming Insurrection by the Invisible Committee
Reclaim the Game: Boom or Bust by John Reid
Postsecularism (video)text by Rosi Braidotti
For May’s general election RG staged a day of reading and actions
Erasing Iraq chapter from Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
Freee Manifesto For a Counter-Hegemonic Art by FREEE
In Praise of Psychoanalysis conversation from For What Tomorrow by Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco
Sentences on Littoral Art by Bruce Barber – a public event for Nerve Centre
Performance at The Cooperative event at the Liverpool Biennial
Maresa MacKeith writings on Inclusion and Vulnerability + The True Architect in The Principle of Hope, Volume 3 by Ernst Bloch
Introduction from Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu
2011
Shadow Feminisms: Queer Negativity/Radical Passivity by Judith Halberstam
Plas Caerdeon retreat weekend: walking, being silent, being interrupted, watching films, reading…
The Politics of Friendship by Jacques Derrida
Pedagogy of Freedom by Paulo Friere
Landscape/Space/Politics: An Essay by Doreen Massey
Animals as Persons by David Sztybel
Mourning and Melancholia by Sigmund Freud + Santa Sangre film
The Accursed Share by Georges Bataille
Violence by Slavoj Zizek
A Story of an Eye by Georges Bataille
How to be A Woman by Caitlin Moran + Xmas party
2012
An Essay on Liberation by Herbert Marcuse
If This is A Man by Primo Levi
Manifesto for Cyborgs by Donna Haraway
Gary’s 40th Bday Party at Plas Caerdeon
The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home 