Kaja Silverman

Kaja Silverman (born September 16, 1947) is an American art historian and critical theorist. She is currently the Katherine and Keith L. Sachs Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in English from Brown University. Thereafter, she taught at Yale University, Trinity College, Simon Fraser University, Brown University, the University of Rochester and for many years was the Class of 1940 Professor in the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, and is currently the holder of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award.

Work

Her writing and teaching are focused at the moment primarily on photography, contemporary art, and painting. She is currently writing the second volume of a three part revisionary history and theory of photography. The first volume, Miracle of Analogy, was published in 2015.

Silverman has written extensively on a wide range of figures including artists: Jean-Luc Godard, Gerhard Richter, Marcel Proust, Ranier Maria Rilke, Terrence Malick, James Coleman, Jeff Wall, Chantal Akerman, John Dugdale, and thinkers: Jacques Lacan Friedrich Nietzsche Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, [[Maurice Merleau-Ponty], Lou Andreas Salome.

Silverman co-wrote the Jean-Luc Godard work with the German artist and filmmaker Harun Farocki, her life partner from 1992-1999. It reflects the sensibility of a feminist film theorist with a close reading of eight Godard films.

"This is an extraordinary book: Silverman's magnum opus. In some respects it is sui generis, and yet its stakes are so high they could almost be called universal. In my opinion, this is the kind of book that one comes across only a few times in one's life. It is that important."

Publications

• The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford University Press, 1983)
• The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1988)
• Male Subjectivity at the Margins (Routledge Press, 1992)
• The Threshold of the Visible World (Routledge Press, 1996)
• Speaking About Godard (New York University Press, 1998; with Harun Farocki)
• World Spectators (Stanford University Press, 2000)
• James Coleman (Munich: Hatje Cantz, 2002; ed. Susanne Gaensheimer)
• Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford University Press, 2009)
• The Miracle of Analogy: or The History of Photography, Part 1 (Stanford University Press, 2015)

External links

• Kaja Silverman lecture on Gehard Richter on YouTube
• "The Twilight of Posterity." Kaja Silverman Lecture at UC Berkeley.
• Art, Technology and Culture Colloquium audio from 'Lectures with Lindsay'
• Website

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