Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienze dell'Educazione

Abstract: This lecture investigates the idea of a painting-in-waiting by importing the idea of waiting into a critical philosophy of history and art. There is no one thing meant by waiting. It can mean to pause, hesitate, linger, falter, or to anticipate with trepidation or hope. But it can also mean to serve as once ladies-in-waiting served in courts or as waiters in restaurants once stood in readiness, perhaps to the point of Sartrean nausea, fully prepared to accommodate the needs of others. I have three questions. One is how, through dialectical inversion, waiting has come to mean a serving of the self and thus a freedom from the serving of others. The second is why a Beckett-like endgame of waiting is so often a waiting for a new game to begin, but where in truth there is only one game to play. And the third is what we learn about the critical labor of negation in thinking about waiting by reference to blank paintings, or, indeed, to books whose empty pages are not yet written.