Roland Végső / Aaron Meskin: Concepts and Technology

On Friday, 28 May at 5 pm, the Institute of Philosophy ZRC SAZU will host Roland Végső and Aaron Meskin from the University of Georgia (USA).

Program

17:00 – 18:00

Roland Végső

On Useless Concepts: Walter Benjamin and Fascism

My presentation will examine Walter Benjamin’s claim in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” that the concepts introduced in his essay are “completely useless for the purposes of fascism.” My argument will proceed in two steps. First, thinking along with Benjamin, I will raise the question of “uselessness”—especially as it relates to conceptual constructions and their political deployments. Second, moving beyond the horizon of Benjamin’s own reflections, I will examine what happens to critical concepts themselves (rather than the work of art) in the age of their technological (re)producibility. 

18:00 – 19:00

Aaron Meskin

Conceptual Engineering Aesthetics in the Age of AI

How should we think about art and creativity in the age of AI? I suggest that answering aesthetic questions about AI-produced and AI-assisted works requires making certain decisions; that is, we cannot simply rely on applying our existing aesthetic and artistic concepts to settle them. Answering these questions calls for designing, evaluating, reconstructing, and using various aesthetic concepts. In short, we must engage in conceptual engineering.

Roland Végső is Department Head and Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he teaches literary and critical theory and twentieth-century literatures. His primary research interests are 20th-century continental philosophy, modernism, and translation theory. He is the author of three books: The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture (Fordham UP, 2013); Worldlessness After Heidegger: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction (Edinburgh UP, 2020); and The Dialectical Screen: Walter Benjamin on Television (Forthcoming from Northwestern UP, 2026). In addition, he is also the translator of numerous philosophical essays as well as two books: Rodolphe Gasché’s Georges Bataille: Phenomenology and Phantasmatology (Stanford UP, 2012) and Peter Szendy’s All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage (Fordham UP, 2016). He is the co-editor of the Provocations book series published by University of Nebraska Press.

Aaron Meskin is Professor and Head of Philosophy at the University of Georgia. Previously, he was Professor of Philosophical Aesthetics at the University of Leeds. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on philosophical aesthetics, philosophical psychology, and the philosophy of food. He has edited or co-edited seven books, including Opposite: Poems, Philosophy and Coffee (Valley Press, 2019) and The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (Wiley, 2012). He is chair of the American Philosophical Association's Committee on International Cooperation.

This event is supported by an International Research Collaboration Grant from the University of Georgia’s Office of Global Engagement.