Disfiguration: Art after Humanism

Harvard FAS

This course addresses two intersecting discourses. First, critiques of humanism from Sylvia Wynter, who analyzes the figure of "Man" as a specter of colonialism, Michel Foucault, who charts the rise of "human sciences," and "post-humanists" like Donna Haraway, who explore human relations to animals and machines. These thinkers will inform a revision of the history of modern art, which is often told through the disappearance of figuration into abstraction. Instead, we will work with the term…