Matérialités de la transparence. Les avant-gardes entre utopies totalitaires et héritage critique

Emmanuel Alloa, professor at the University of Fribourg and fellow for one month at the Paris IAS in January 2026, will give a lecture entitled "Materialities of Transparency: The Avant-Garde between Totalitarian Utopias and Critical Heritage" at UCLouvain Saint-Louis Brussels.

This lecture is part of the seminar "Looking, seeing, glimpsing: transparency and opacity in representation", organised by the Centre Prospéro, and will be held on 9 January from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Presentation of the cycle

From 3 September 2025 to 29 May 2026, the Centre Prospéro, an interdisciplinary research centre at the Catholic University of Louvain, is organising a series of sessions devoted to the question of vision, both perceptive and imaginative. We will examine what discourse, text or image (representations in the broadest sense) allow us to see, and our ability to grasp the meaning or significance of what we see. Does vision access meaning with complete transparency or, on the contrary, does it lose itself in the opacity of the visible? Between these two extremes, a wide spectrum of possibilities unfolds, where vision and imagination clash with the ambiguity of representations that oscillate between the aim of transparency and the test of opacity.
These very broad questions can be explored in several different ways, whether through literary, pictorial or cinematographic works, or even philosophical discourse. These approaches can, of course, be combined in a single session.

About the Centre Prospéro

Like the Shakespearean character who gave it its name, the Centre Prospéro. Language, Image and Knowledge explores the multiple potentialities of the faculty of imagination – the Phantasia after which the scientific journal published by the Centre was named. Imagination is thus explored in all its dimensions: as a mental faculty, it is related to the functioning of language; as the creation of images, it requires the analysis of all its productions, whether cultural, artistic, psychic, social or political, ideological or utopian; as a performative act, it is the source of fiction in that it allows for the invention of the possible, in all fields of discourse, knowledge and the arts.

The intertwining of philosophy and literature is the focus of the Centre Prospéro's work, across the full range of its approaches (from aesthetics to the philosophy of ordinary language, from political theories to the philosophy of history, from the history of literature to literary theory, including comparative and intermedial analyses). But this work also extends to film and theatre studies as well as art history, and cultivates a fruitful dialogue with other humanities: history, psychoanalysis, sociology and anthropology, linguistics and translation studies, legal theory and political science, etc. Interdisciplinarity as a culture of dialogue and the breaking down of disciplinary barriers therefore drives the various components of the Prospéro Centre, its research and its organisations.

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