Global Humanities Junior Research and Teaching Stay at Freie Universitaet Berlin

This project focuses on the specific kind of normativity that images convey, “iconic normativity”. Starting from the analysis of advertising images, Coccia will try to isolate and identify the nature and the functioning of the various and complex setting of norms and normative claims the medium of images or iconic forms can convey. Advertising images are those images in a given society that cannot be defined by exclusively aesthetic or cognitive features because their specific difference lies in the very capacity to carry out regulating and normative tasks. On one hand, the idea of the exclusively verbal and linguistic nature of the norm could be questioned: what would a legal system that produces norms only via iconic items look like? An iconic norm can no longer be characterized by the same preceptive aspect of verbal norms. The efficacy of social images in consolidating habits and taste judgments could be considered from a normative and juridical point of view. On the other hand, investigating advertising images would allow us to understand what an image is, when its task is no longer the communication of information (i.e. a cognitive task) nor the production of aesthetic feelings of pleasure or displeasure, but the realization of a norm.

Emanuele Coccia is Associate Professor for Philosophy and Social Sciences at l’ École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He studied in Florence, Barcelona and Frankfurt. Between 2008 and 2011, Coccia taught History of Philosophy at Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg. Among his publications are: La trasparenza delle imagine. Averroè e l'averroismo, Milano 2005 (Spanish transl. 2008), La vie sensible, Paris 2011 (translated into Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, English), and Le bien dans les choses, Paris 2013 (Italian and Spanish transl. 2014, Portuguese and German transl. forthcoming) and Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam, Milano 2009 (with G. Agamben).