Philosophy Seminars - “Thinking with Paintings”
An Attempt at a Dialogue between Adorno and Caravaggio: Representation, Image and the “More” of the Work
Speaker: Umur Başdaş
Moderator: Emre Şan
For Adorno, the encounter between Odysseus and Polyphemus is one of the moments in which the dialectic of Enlightenment crystallizes. Polyphemus stands for a mythic and archaic order in which representation and object have not yet been separated by firm boundaries, while Odysseus stands for the process of constructing the sovereign subject who dominates nature through technique. The encounter of David and Goliath, which Caravaggio painted more than once, can likewise be opened to a similar reading. Although Adorno has no comprehensive study of Caravaggio or Baroque painting, his reception of the concepts of expression and allegory, which hold a central place in Benjamin’s analysis of Baroque drama, offers us a ground for such a reading. In this presentation, by examining Caravaggio’s works from an Adornian perspective, we will carry the discussion from drama to Baroque painting and thus to the problem of representation and image. More specifically, we will investigate how Adorno’s thought on the work’s conceptually inexhaustible “more” becomes visible in Caravaggio’s paintings. In this way, by showing how Adorno and Caravaggio can shed light on each other, we will give concrete form to the political collaboration between philosophy and art in the context of Critical Theory.
Biography
Umur Başdaş, a faculty member at Koç University, graduated from the German High School and Boğaziçi University and then completed his PhD in political philosophy at Yale University. In the book he published after his doctorate, he examined the transformation of the relationship between nature and art in the Critical Theory tradition and criticized Habermas’s reduction of nature to a mute object through readings of Kant, Hegel, Fichte and Adorno. In his other work he has focused on aesthetics and ethics in Kant, logic and consciousness in Hegel, and the relationship between art and politics in Adorno. In his current work he continues to think about the link between aesthetics and ontology.
* The seminar will be held in Turkish. To attend this seminar, you can create your registration by using the "Register" button on the page and receive your free event invitation. Registrations will open 1 week before the event date (31.12.2026, at 18:30) and the "Register" button will become visible. Participation is limited to a quota of 70 people.
* Participants who have completed the event registration and received their invitation are kindly requested to be at the venue at least 15 minutes before the event. The doors will be closed at the event starting time.