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Document Type

Text

Broad Creation Date

2026

Language

English

Location

Portland

Abstract

This present dissertation unravels what I call territories of non-catharsis. These interstitial sites interrogate the prescriptive force inherited across millennia from Aristotelian catharsis. Established as one of Western aesthetics’ founding principles, catharsis is here challenged as an insidious technology of anesthetization. Instead, I assert that the concept of non-catharsis is an ethico-aesthetic imperative, one that opens upon more fertile and volatile possibilities. Or in other words, experiential modes that resist consolation and refuse to metabolize violence and its representations into digestible forms. Situated within philosophical conversations that choose multiplicity and constellatory thinking as an affront to logical outcomes and rationale, the questions and arguments set forth in this inquiry aim to disrupt the teleological outcomes that the concept of catharsis purports to deliver. To accomplish this task, I look at an assemblage of global contemporary artists and artworks identifying theoretical and material instances where non-cathartic readings may be observed. The lens by which these illustrations are surveyed comes in the form of five artist-figures who assume the roles of perpetrator, preservationist, post- mortician, chimerist, and destructionist, each employing their own particular register of engagement. The outcome of this investigation illuminates ‘other-logical’ ways of interacting with artworks that create sustained discomfort while establishing a heightened sense of awareness of suffering and traumatic inheritance. Finally, a poetic praxis that insists upon the ethical necessity of irresolution, sustaining fermentative spaces of shared witnessing, is established.

Keywords: Non-Catharsis, Poetic-Knowing, Vulnerability, Compassion, Witnessing, Refusal.

Disciplines

Aesthetics | Arts and Humanities | Philosophy

Publisher

Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts

City

Portland ME

TERRITORIES OF NON-CATHARSIS: REFUSAL, RUINATION, VULNERABILITY



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