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"Pornographic Faith: Two Sources of Naked Sense at the Limits of Belief and Humiliation"

War porn, strip searches, and the photos from Abu Ghraib prison are just some of the spectacular scenes of violence and humiliation in the contemporary age of global militarized neo-liberalism. Ricco's lecture considers these not only as the libidinal motor that drives what Naomi Klein famously referred to as “the shock doctrine,” but also argues that they are the means by which the society of spectacle masochistically stages the autoimmune destruction of the national-security state. Theorizing “pornographic faith” as a double resistance to systems of belief that are at once theological and financial, Ricco looks to images where bodies are on the line, without teetering over the edge into either a state of infinite humiliation or everlasting redemption.

John Paul Ricco’s work on social-sexual ethics and aesthetics lies at the intersection of art history, continental philosophy, queer theory, and architecture. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and The Decision Between Us: art & ethics in the time of scenes (Chicago, 2014). He is currently completing a third book, titled: The Outside Not Beyond: pornographic faith and the economy of the eve. He served as Chair of the Editorial Board of Art Journal (2004-2006) and has edited issues of the journals Parallax (“Unbecoming”), and Journal of Visual Culture (Jean-Luc Nancy). Ricco is Associate Professor and Graduate Professor in the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto.

Sponsored by the art department.

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Lectures and Seminars