May felt, for instance, illuminate felt experience?

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     In this course, we will ask how materials transcend their meaning. To that end, we will turn to broken and partial objects, found and flanneled ones, what counts and does not count as whole. By attempting to apprehend these objects, we will pursue the ways in which art and architecture, especially in their institutional context, manage otherness, expressing or repressing the contradictions at the heart of the built environment.

 

     How do objects, in contrast, enact otherness within us? Does what we repress return abjectly, lodging itself in the structure of the psyche? We will explore, in this regard, the objects we introject. May mourning our sameness, then, ease our relationship with the vagaries of the world? The seminar will serve as a critical introduction to phenomenology as a philosophical project, as well as to psychoanalysis in its Lacanian guise.

 

     Throughout the course, we will wander in and around Amman, its mountainous outskirts and southern flatland, across its urban heaps of stone and glass. How do we apprehend objects when otherness itself is assigned a political and aesthetic meaning, deployed as a marker of criticality in liberal rhetoric or of originality in architectural practice? Might unmeant elements of the city, in turn, illuminate otherness in its own terms?

 

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