This project elaborates an aesthetic politics that treats the possible as the site of a transformative exhaustion. It examines the aberrant temporal movements that are produced by exhaustive procedures, arguing that by disrupting the habitual structure of time, what I refer to as stereoscopic time, they render the present susceptible to the dynamic emergence of the new. Referencing Samuel Beckett’s exhaustive strategies, the project develops the political stakes of this dynamic temporality through a reading of the often misread character of Proust’s Albertine Simonet, and her subsequent incarnation as Ariane/Jeanne in the films of Belgian director Chantal Akerman. ] In line with Jacques Rancière’s recent work, what follows considers aesthetics and politics together based on their shared capacity to affect the order by which bodies and words are differentiated and distributed, rather than according to art’s ability to bridge (or not) the separation between fiction and reality. Engaging in a critical departure from Rancière, however, it dwells on the temporal specificity of art’s transformative process. Specifically, my intervention in contemporary debates surrounding art’s political efficacy consists of the development of a concept of the “meanwhile” that transcends the opposition between a present and a future politics, reframing the effects of art as an immanent redrawing of the landscape of the possible.

Last modified

• 04/25/2019

Creator

• Caitlyn Doyle

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2896C

Subject

• Comparative Literary Studies

Keyword

• Proust
• Possible
• Film
• Politics
• Aesthetics
• Time

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright