#   “What can I hope?”: Race, Abyssal Aesthetics, and the Failure of Beauty 

 



    ![abstract image](/sites/g/files/omnuum4936/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/mahindra/files/german_studies_01.jpg?itok=v4BoHGxu) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **February 20, 2025** 

 05:00PM - 06:30PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Barker Center, Room 133**  



 

 



 

## [GERMAN STUDIES: NEW PERSPECTIVES](/german-studies-new-perspectives)

## SPEAKER: Jessica Ruffin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This talk addresses the function of the beautiful in accounts of aesthetic and ethical intersubjectivity. Immanuel Kant’s racialized ideal of human beauty and morality affords an interrogation of colorblind optimism. Engaging the promise of beauty as that of abstraction from the ground of phenomenal experience, I contend with beauty’s failure amidst ongoing histories of racialization and white supremacy. As an alternative to abstraction as transcendence, I turn to Frantz Fanon, Arthur Schopenhauer, and my own embodiment to refigure abstraction as abyssal descent.

### About the Speaker

Jessica Ruffin is Assistant Professor of Film and Media in the Literature Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research and teaching constellate media theory and historiography, German aesthetic traditions, philosophies of race, and auto-philosophical exploration. Her work has been published in *New German Critique*, *qui parle*, and *Millennium Film Journal*. Her current book project, *Becoming Amphibious, or the question of ethics in white supremacist worlding* is a work of speculative media philosophy, which seeks figures of ethical receptivity capable of undoing white supremacy and racial capitalism worlding environments.

   ![Jessica Ruffin headshot](/sites/g/files/omnuum4936/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/mahindra/files/jessica_ruffin.jpeg?itok=N7oawWs1) 

 



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Seminar ](/event-type/seminar)
- [ German Studies: New Perspectives ](/seminars/german-studies-new-perspectives)
 
 

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