Seminar Description: The seminar will examine beauty's relation to justice and evil and will undertake to explain the viewpoint of the philosopher Elaine Scarry. Students will also study books by Freud and articles by Walter Benjamin, Alexander Nehamas, Laura Mulvey and Stanley Cavell. Scarry argues that beauty has copies in the world and thus enhances mistakes in aesthetic judgment. One can find beauty in a simple imitation or suppress an aesthetic experience in the presence of deep, sophisticated beauty. Scarry discloses to her reader that she herself repressed the complex function of palms in the representation of beauty in Matisse's Morocco paintings—and this mistake in aesthetic judgment proves how material the world is and how the metaphysical aspects of the object and the subject disappear in the presence of the beautiful. Hence, Scarry asserts that the beautiful exposes the exaggerated materiality of the world and unravels the world's vulnerability to injury and damage and states that thus the beautiful renders the existence of justice necessary—although justice is external to our sensory powers. First, we will examine Scarry's concepts and by using those notions we will study literary text, canvases and films that stress the tension between the attraction to the beautiful and the appearance of justice in the world—which is exposed to injury that emerges from the eternal, open or hidden, activity of the evil. As the semester winds up, students will study that manners have an aesthetic value and when evil uses those to advance its goals it becomes difficult to identify. Evil is hidden deep under layers and layers of manners and cultural justifications that social living brings to human relations.