Lecture – Solitudes: Past and Present

Public Lecture – Professor Thomas Laqueur on ‘Canines in Solitude: The Gaze of the Dog in Western Art’

Tasha Pick — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 13:25:29 +0000

Albrecht Dürer, ‘Saint Eustace’. Engraving. ca. 1501. Met Museum 19.73.65

‘With their parallel lives,’ writes John Berger, animals ‘offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.’ This lecture argues that the gaze of the dog, grounded in evolution and appropriated by visual artists in the western tradition, offers a way of representing being seen – being regarded as worth regard – as a defence against loneliness both as a species and as social beings. Dogs are cultural doppelgängers of the human, creatures whose ways of seeing and very presence stand in a metonymic relationship to how we – artists and those who look at art – see in the world and want to be seen.

Professor Thomas Laqueur, based at Berkeley, University of California, is the author of Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003), and The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015), among many others.

Time: 6pm-7:30pm

This lecture will take place online. All are welcome but registration is required. Please click here to register your attendance.

The post Public Lecture – Professor Thomas Laqueur on ‘Canines in Solitude: The Gaze of the Dog in Western Art’ appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Public lecture – Amy Hungerford on ‘Networked Solitude and the Costs of Public Life’

Clare Whitehead — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 08:48:43 +0000

What is the cost of publicity for the human person? This question takes on special urgency in societies where a public life is offered to anyone with an internet connection, yet loneliness has been called an epidemic. Amy Hungerford draws together the history of fame; fresh insights from sociology, and psychology, and cognitive science; and case studies from public lives enabled by older forms of media to reveal fundamental features of our contemporary predicament. She argues that understanding the social aspects of solitude – what she calls “networked solitude” – both sharpens our accounting of publicity’s costs and offers a way to live under conditions of modern exposure.

Registration is required for this lecture – please click here for tickets.

The post Public lecture – Amy Hungerford on ‘Networked Solitude and the Costs of Public Life’ appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Inaugural lecture – Barbara Taylor on ‘Philosophical Solitude’

Vanda Lengyel — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 16:23:14 +0000

The philosopher mediating alone in his study is a cliché of western culture. But behind the hackneyed image lies a long history of controversy.

Was solitude the ‘school of genius’, as Edward Gibbon claimed, or did it breed irrationalism, dogmatism and melancholy, as Dr Johnson and others insisted? In the 1730s David Hume suffered a breakdown which he attributed to his solitary philosophising; three decades later, in a much-publicised quarrel with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hume attacked Rousseau’s reclusiveness as ‘savage’, ‘bestial’, the mark of an ‘arrant madman’.

A life of lone thought was pathological: a judgement that still finds echoes in present-day concerns about social isolation and loneliness.

The lecture will be chaired by Professor Cora Kaplan

Registration is required for this lecture – please click here for tickets.

The post Inaugural lecture – Barbara Taylor on ‘Philosophical Solitude’ appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.