Events

What does it mean for a nation to put its interest first?

Are human beings predisposed to be cultic?

How do humanity’s great abstractions function over time? This course on the philosophy of history considers the subject in chaos, stasis, progress, and providence.

How are architectural visualisation of the future – from anglofuturist progress to ecological utopia – shaping the thing itself?

A screening series exploring moral and social questions and examining cruelty, suffering, and evil in filmic artefacts chosen by members.

The history of gay liberation has been a dance of two steps forward, a step backwards, and a few sideway jumps. Today, a new fight for another vision of LGBTQ+ freedom rages on.

Why do so many artists and writers gravitate towards conspiracy and intrigue as a metaphor for aesthetics?

Long considered a moribund discipline, aesthetics has made a surprise comeback. This seminar asks what aesthetics was before it was subjected to a radical critique since the mid-19th century.

Canonical gay art was once inextricably transgressive. Today, it’s free but saccharine. If, as artists believed merely decades ago, true freedom lives on in dystopia, who is today’s visionary Jean Genet?

Verdurin leads a rare private tour of The Dorian Gray Attic at The Rainbow Museum of Queer Life.

Francisco Goya captured the darkness of his time like no other artist. From war to personal torment, his visions still haunt us.

If we don’t control our present, is it too late to shape our future?

Ageing liberal democracies are plagued by a crisis of legitimacy. Efforts to save them only make things worse.

Are we living in a post-comedy word?

Cells and Salons plants the seed of aesthetic desires and watches them give rise to new worlds. It extends the invitation to conspire and theorise to both faithful and aspiring members of Verdurin’s petit clan. 

Join Verdurin for the as-seen-on-TV event of the year and experience again the fear, tears, and paranoia of the live news channel analysis and raw unedited footage of the disaster. 

This four-part course will examine the question of images, their effect on us and what use we make of them.

A reading of a new play by Oliver Bennett exploring ideas of transference and authoritarianism, specifically written to accompany Anna Sebastian’s exhibition with which it shares its title.

Does the marriage of economic progressivism with social conservatism signal a politics beyond Left and Right?

How can we confront the post-Covid onset of the totalitarian New Normal? Café American editors and contributors Elana Lange, George Hoare, Daniel Hadas, and Chris Bateman discuss censorship and free speech, collectivist ideology, and societal vulnerability.

New York psychoanalyst and author Jamieson Webster explores the relationship of art and psychoanalysis, with the artist’s studio and the analyst’s couch as sites of convergence.

American anti-intellectualism is rampant and spreading. Theory Underground’s European tour brings a cast of “American Idiots” to London as unofficial counter-ambassadors of this movement.  

Long considered a moribund discipline, aesthetics has made a surprise comeback. In its current form, however, aesthetics has little to do with the Enlightenment notions on which it was originally based. This seminar led by Jacob Koster asks what aesthetics was before it was subjected to a radical critique since the mid-19th century.