Wed 20 Oct, 2021
In this talk Paul Binski reconsiders Gothic representation from the perspective of what G. G. Harpham called ‘The Ascetic Imperative’. By this he means not institutionalized Christian asceticism (though this plays a role) but rather asceticism considered as the curtailment of conduct or form. He wants to explore this principle at work in aesthetic activity as an antidote to Romantic or post-Romantic conceptions of Gothic art as a mode of liberation (the ‘affective turn’) or as a form of sincerity, though he will be taking Romantic insights as a working starting-point. His topic will include the problem of sculpture and the passions (portal sculpture especially in France and Germany), and the relation of the natural and the artificial in medieval wildness and cultivation. In both, he suggests, the ascetic imperative produces a form of flourishing which challenges the boundary of the natural and the artificial.