Philosophy and Literature: Eyal Peretz - The Work of Art: From Sacrifice to Democracy

The Research Workshop in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts is proud to host, in co-sponsorship with Stanford's English Department and Department of Art and Art History, a discussion with Prof. Eyal Peretz Comparative Literature, Indiana Bloomington University on The Work of Art: From Sacrifice to Democracy

What is the place that the work of art has not only come to occupy but has secretly and unconsciously aimed to occupy in the general economy of human life in the age we have come to call modernity, that is, from the European Renaissance onward?

The two texts that we will be discussing—one engaging with a fundamental work from early modernity, Leonardo’s Last Supper, and the other with a fundamental work from American late modernity, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather—suggest that, beyond the aesthetic model, which has been the main philosophical framework through which to think art in modernity, a new existential task has been unconsciously aimed at by the modern work of art. Such a task, the texts suggest, revolves around a secret desire guiding the modern work to become the site through the engagement with which human life transitions from being subjected to a broadly defined sacrificial and theological framework to inhabiting a broadly defined democratic one, understood as the framework of a sharing of the world without hierarchy.

Eyal Peretz is Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of several works on such figures as Melville, Diderot, Leonardo, Brian De Palma, and others, spanning the history of modernity from the Renaissance onward; these works all attempt to explore the above-mentioned questions.

RSVP for the Eyal Peretz event here.