SENSIBLE LIFE

he fourth and last event of Fall Quarter 2016 is a conversation with philosopher Emanuele Coccia whose work poetically  examines the life of images in media, fashion, advertising, and plants (the vegetal world being the topic of his most recent book).  The conversation takes its title from Coccia’s recently translated book Sensible Life: A Micro-ontology of the Image (Fordham U. Press, 2016), and meanders through a series of inter-connected problems in his work: theories of reception and conceptions of intermediality in medieval philosophy—Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in particular; the Thomist and scholastic sources of Marshall Mc Luhan’s philosophy of media and technology; a distinction between the sensible and the sensory; the moral status of images and practices of self-fashioning in contemporary fashion, design, and advertising; an “atmospheric” image of thought that challenges the distribution of disciplines in the human sciences and humanities.  Throughout the conversation, Tarek Elhaik invites his guest to also engage their shared commitment to create, via image-work, a mode of relation between the art of living, ethical work, and post-disciplinary inquiry.

manuele Coccia is an Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris.He received his PhD in Philology  in Florence after studying in Macerata, Rom and Berlin. After post-Doc positions in Paris and Barcelona he worked as Assistant Professor of History of Philosophy in Freiburg, Germany between 2008 and 2011. His works focus mainly on the history of religious normativity and on aesthetics. His most recent book is La Vie des Plantes: Pour une Metaphysique du Melange (Rivages, November 2016).  His other publications include La trasparenza delle immagini. Averroè e l’averroismo (Mondadori Bruno, 2005), Sensible Life. A Micro-Ontology of the Image (Fordham University Press, 2016), Le bien dans les choses (Rivages, 2013). With Giorgio Agamben as a co-editor, he published an anthology on angels in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts: Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (Neri Pozza, 2009).