Thursday 11 March at 19:30

Location: M HKA, Leuvenstraat 32, BE-2000 Antwerp

In her lecture Esther Leslie will discuss the borders between nature and culture through animation, and focus on the debates around renaturalization of the artificial through biotechnologies.

Esther Leslie is a Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London, and an established and formidable scholar of the work of Walter Benjamin. Her research interest focuses on Marxist theories of aesthetics and culture, with a particular emphasis on the work of Benjamin and Adorno. Her other fields of interest include European literary and visual modernism, the 'everyday', memory and history, madness and expression and digital aesthetics. She is the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto 2000), Hollywood Flatland: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (Verso 2002), Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005), and Walter Benjamin (Reaktion 2007). She has published her translations of the works of Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, and is actively involved in editing three journals – Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, Radical Philosophy and Revolutionary History. Together with Ben Watson she runs the website militantesthetix.co.uk.

Language English