Emanuele Coccia

On March 28, 2023, Emanuele Coccia from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris presented a talk that anticipates some of the arguments contained in a forthcoming book collaboratively written with the former art director of Gucci and noted fashion designer, Alessandro Michele, entitled Fashion as Philosophy :: making philosophy with fabrics:: making clothes with concepts.

After a doctorate in medieval philosophy and philology at the University of Florence, Coccia received post-doctoral grants at the Max Planck Institut in Frankfurt am Main, the CNRS, and the Universitat Autonoma di Barcelona. He was an assistant professor at the University of Freiburg in Breisgau. He regularly teaches in fashion schools. He was an invited professor at the universities of Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Düsseldorf, and Harvard and spent a year of research at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University in New York. After working on the history of European normativity and on aesthetics, his current research focuses on conceptions of life on the one hand and on the ontological status and normative power of images in fashion and advertising on the other. Among his publications are The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (2018), Goods: Advertising, Urban Space and the Moral Law of the Image (2018), and Sensible Life. A Micro-Ontology of the Image (New York 2016). Together with Giorgio Agamben, he edited an anthology on angels in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (2009). Together with Donatien Grau he published an inquiry on the birth of the concept store The Transitory Museum (2018).