Seminar Thomas d’Aquinas & G. Didi Huberman

Western philosophy has had and, sometimes, continues to have a difficult and complex relationship with affectivity, passions and feelings. However, in various ways, the emotional life will have been thought of from Aristotle to the Stoics, from Thomas Aquinas to Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, etc.

The 20th century oscillated, in philosophy and other disciplines, between the primacy of suffering, pain and pain and the liberation of desire and the promotion of enjoyment. He will have been attentive to the “complaint” as much as to the cries of joy, to the temporality of these experiences as much as to the speeches which express them.

This course intends to propose two interpretative threads of what happened there, two threads which will be crossed. The first thread, heterochronic (Foucault), comes from a careful reading of questions and treatments of “passions” by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, before the invention of the idea of the responsible and rational individual subject. The second thread will come from the contemporary reflections of George Didi-Huberman on the “facts of affects” which attempt to go beyond the psychologizing aporias of discourse on affects, passions, feelings, emotions.