Mehmet Şiray
“The Return of the Image: Jacques Rancière’s Thoughts on the Future of the Image”
Jacques Rancière notes that when he was writing his book “The Politics of Aesthetics”, he was aiming for the book to critically approach the distinction between image and truth – which has been haunting the history of western philosophy – to be able to relieve the “image” from being a signifier of alienation, of the ideological, or of artificiality. According to Rancière, we should be rethinking the image today; the truth of the image does not merely lie in the fact that it is a mask and that it conceals the truth, or that it distorts it for us; the image also contains the potential to divide the truth into pieces and to transform it. Focusing particularly on metaphorical images, Rancière argues that they have the potential of generating radical transformations in our ways of perceiving the world. In this seminar, we will be talking about Rancière’s thoughts on the “image”, and discussing the notion that thinking about the image is directly related to how we perceive, sense, and understand the world.
Mehmet Şiray completed his undergraduate studies at the Department of Philosophy of Middle East Technical University in 1997, and continued his studies at Bilkent University, Faculty of Fine Arts with a focus on Philosophy of Art until 2002. He obtained his PhD from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2007. He has been a faculty member of the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University since 2009. He has published several articles on B. Spinoza, R. Girard, G. Bataille, J. Rancière, and J. L. Nancy with a focus on Philosophy of Art, and Philosophy of Aesthetics and Politics. He is the author of the book Performance and Performativity, published by Peter Lang in 2009.
The event is free of charge. Invitations available from the Akbank Sanat ticket office on the event day, one hour before the event begins.