Contemporary Theories and New History of Art: Georges Didi-Huberman and Giorgio Agamben

By treating the intersection between the field of contemporary theories and the formation of the new history of art, we are faced with emerging problems such as appropriation, the relation between monument and document, the play of memory, the critique of the gaze, extended notions of gender, identification, performance and a critique of representational formats and narrative construction. In this course, we will focus on these broad issues from the works of two thinkers in the present days, Giorgio Agamben and Georges Didi-Huberman. It is a clipping from the vast problems that historiographic production face, which also involves the confrontation of theoretical models that surpass the disciplinary knowledge of the artistic product and the traditional history of the arts, focusing and demanding relations with philosophy, aesthetics, psychoanalytic thought, critical theory, the social history of art and visual studies and visual culture.