John Paul Ricco

University of Toronto

John Paul Ricco is Professor of Contemporary Art, Queer Theory, Aesthetics & Ethics at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure and The Decision Between Us: Art and ethics in the time of scenes. Recently published essays include “Mourning, Melancholia, Moonlight,” in CR: The New Centennial Review; “The Commerce of Anonymity” in Qui Parle; and chapters in the collections Nancy and the Political (Edinburgh) and Porn Archives (Duke). His essay: “Moths to the Flame: Photography and the Capitalocene” will be in the edited volume Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021) and his essay, “The Virtue and Value of Disappearance,” on extinction as provocation for thought, will be published in Intercalations 6: These Birds of Temptation (K. Verlag, 2020). These two essays are part of a book project he is completing on extinction aesthetics titled The Collective Afterlife of Things.  

On 13 February 2020, Ricco delivered the lecture “The Invisible Flight of the Birds” at the CHR. Through a reading of Agamben, Heidegger, Foucault, and Marcus Aurelius, the paper argued for the virtue and value of disappearance and the ways in which the force of extinction is itself the provocation for thought. During his stay as a visiting scholar, Ricco also presented the paper “Moths to the Flame: Photography and the Capitalocene” as part of the South African Contemporary History and Humanities Series.