Recorded Lecture: Scott Wilson, "Neroplatonism"

Theory, speculative realism and neurology (amongst other things) spin out into new considerations of love with this lecture by Scott Wilson, presented at the recent Speculative Medievalism conference in London on January 2011 and posted, with many thanks, on his personal blog. Bouncing from a late-night and symposiumesque conversation between Bataille, A. J. Ayer, Merleau Ponty and Giorgio Ambrosini, to Petrarchan scholarship in relation to the oxymoronical and formless conditions of amusia and prosopagnosia, and further onwards to consideration of Ovid's version of the Narcissus tale, Wilson playfully explores the agnosic experience of "neroplatonic love": musical noise, faceless faces and forms of formlessness.

"The point I wish to make in this paper, speculatively and playfully titled ‘Neroplatonism’, is that it is the heteronomy of form itself that produces the ‘unease’ through which we do not not know the heterogeneity of objects and the world(s) they inhabit."

His lecture was also recorded at the Speculative Medievalisms conference. It is available for download or streaming here.