Hägerströmföreläsningarna 2026 – Paul Taylor

Datum: 18 mars 2026, kl. 15.15 – 20 mars 2026, kl. 17.00
Plats: Engelska parken, Humanistiska teatern
Typ: Föreläsning
Arrangör: Filosofiska institutionen
Kontaktperson: Nils-Hennes Stear

Paul Taylor, UCLA: Dark Futures: Essays in the Aesthetics of Hope

Översikt

Six months into World War I, Virginia Woolf found hope at the threshold of hopelessness. After confiding to her journal that the future seemed dark, she added that this "is on the whole, the best thing the future can be." I propose to use the Dark Futures lectures to explore the possibilities hiding in the darkness of our own vexed times.

Each lecture will gather and consider some resources for treating certain markers of our dire circumstances not as invitations to despair or pessimism but as occasions for hope. This will require some theoretical reflection on issues such as the nature of hope and the role of the imagination in philosophical investigation. It will also require some critical engagements with specific exercises in cultural production and analysis, involving figures like Toni Morrison, Amy Sherald, and Ryan Coogler. Two questions will govern the series: What does it take to see the dire darkness as a space of possibility? How in particular might a kind of aesthetic intervention turn the particular invitations to despair that concern so many of us into occasions for hope?

Datum, tid och plats

Datum

18, 19 och 20 mars

Tid

15.15–17.00 (varje dag)

Plats

Humanistiska teatern

Program

Föreläsning 1 – Dark is the Best Thing: Writing it Through

"Dark is the Best Thing: Writing it Through" will introduce the overall project of the lectures and assemble the project’s key theoretical resources. Five elements will carry the bulk of the weight here: a study of Toni Morrison’s account of literary archaeology, with its distinctive appeals to sites and images; a reflection on discernment and interpretation, conducted in the shadow of Stanley Cavell; a comment on moments and events, broadly in the spirit of Alain Badiou; a discussion of the philosophical import of the essay form, influenced by Rebecca Solnit; and an invocation of Ariel Dorfman’s idea of the aesthetics of hope. These studies will culminate in a short tour of the kinds of images that a Morrisonian practice recommends for investigation, and then in an account of philosophical archaeology that will govern the remaining lectures.

Föreläsning 2 – The White Car of Fukushima: Screening Hope and Less

"The White Car of Fukushima: Screening Hope and Less" uses the eponymous image to introduce a study of hope, pessimism, and ordinariness. The idea of hope is central to the project but the philosophical study of hope is not; accordingly, this lecture will stipulate to a particular account of hope while bracketing the wider questions this raises in moral psychology. It will then explore the implications of this approach for the pessimist, and in particular for the Afropessimist. It will then consider the alternatives to pessimism that emerge when one takes seriously the appeal of the ordinary and the everyday, especially as these are dramatized in some recent popular films.

Föreläsning 3 – The Wings of Reverence and Ecstasy: Painting the Practice of Hope

When there seem to be no reasonable grounds for hope, it is important to remember that resisting despair requires more than assembling good reasons to press on. Hope needs and involves things other than reasons, which leads some people to insist on its experiential dimension, and leads others to echo activist Mariame Kaba’s insistence that hope is a matter of practice and discipline. A great variety of human social practices, with the arts chief among them, aim to promote the conditions for inhabiting and sharing the experience of hopefulness. “The Wings of Reverence and Ecstasy: Painting the Practice of Hope” will examine art’s role in promoting a robust phenomenology of hopefulness by examining a recent painter Amy Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor.

Hägerströmföreläsningarna