This seminar will be dedicated to one philosopher and to one artist from different national situations and different historical generations. We will carefully work through the corpus of each figure and experiment with creating unlikely connections. In the process, we will question the boundaries of philosophy and art as well as the limits and possibilities of comparison. The idea is this: what kind of connections-comparisons (and what kind of theory of comparison) will emerge when we dedicate to two figures at the same time — even though these two figures have no obvious connections and have, most likely, never been thought together. Example pairings include the French philosopher Alain Badiou and Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul or American literary theorist Fredric Jameson and Japanese dancer Min Tanaka. For Fall 2024, we will focus on the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro and either American conceptualist artist Dan Graham, Canadian artist Michael Snow, French filmmaker Claire Denis, Korean-American artist Nam June Paik, American artist Bruce Nauman, or American novelist Octavia E. Butler. Check in over the Summer to confirm.