Publication of Chapter: To Speak of Suffering: Art’s Ethical Obligation

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My chapter on art and suffering is now published in the Routledge anthology, Aesthetic Ethics.

It is so great to see this in print! This is the fruit of my research that I did in France during the summer of 2024! Here is my previous post on my work during that summer. What a great summer!

Here is a pdf of the chapter:

PUBLISHED To Speak of Suffering Art’s Ethical Obligation by Hannah Lyn VenableDownload

Here is the abstract:

When faced with tragedy, human language often fails, forcing us to admit that there are some experiences that words cannot explain. In this silent space of deep suffering, art has a sole voice as it is able to speak to us in a language all its own. Because of this ability, I will argue that art has an ethical obligation to speak into our sufferings. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea that art arises out of silence and Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous claim that art justifies existence, I will first offer further proof for why it is that art must speak of suffering. Next, I will describe how art fulfills this obligation due to its natural use of the vocabulary surrounding suffering including death, brokenness, despair and absurdity as seen in illustrations from the art of the French existentialists, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Lastly, I will reveal what art says to us in the midst of suffering to demonstrate its indispensability; for it is the uncompromising message of art which refuses to soften reality while also calling us to action that makes it possible for us to bear the suffering.

New Book Contract!

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I am excited to announce that I have just signed another book contract with Routledge! I am writing this book with my friend and colleague, Mark Allen. We’ve been talking about this for years and are just so happy that it is finally coming to fruition!

The title of the book is (tentatively): Art and the Flourishing of the Ordinary. (We may change it slightly or add a subtitle.)

Our manuscript is due January 2027 so we have our work cut off for us during this next year!

Here is a short synopsis of what we hope to do:

Our book seeks to shed light on the elusive nature of art and explore why the engagement with and appreciation of art is important for human flourishing. Our inclusion of the “ordinary” is two-fold: ordinary people and ordinary artforms. The first focus is a discussion of ways in which the general public can interact with art by better understanding its most essential qualities and the role that common sensibilities play in the appreciation of art. It is also a critique of the inaccessibility of art over the past century—both culturally and conceptually—as well as a critique of the role that fame, fortune, and education play into society’s perception of what good art is. The second is to see the power that ordinary artforms have in our daily lives. When we let art spill out of the frame, the museum, and the music hall, we see the unique ability of art to expose human suffering and cultivate freedom. More than this, we realize that art is not just something that we view externally, but something that we experience internally in the way we shape our own lives and in the way we let it draw us beyond the material world. We envision readers studying our book at a library, tucking it under the arm on a museum visit, or even bringing it along for a stroll around a park, ready to offer guidance in everyday encounters with art.

Conference Presentation: “Out of the Silence: Art as Irreplaceable in Bearing Experiences of Personal and Political Death”

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I had the opportunity to present a portion of my work on art and suffering, specifically in relation to death, at the American Catholic Philosophical Association hosted at the University of Notre Dame in October 2025

Here is an abstract of the paper:

There is a kind of silence opened up by experiences of death that enters into both personal and political contexts. Because death serves as a crude reminder that there is something not quite right in this world, any effort to explain death will always fall short. We can never provide a satisfying justification for it. This inability of language to respond to death represents a silent gap uncovered in diverse encounters with death. When we lose a loved one early and unexpectedly, the loss pierces us in such a way that our first articulations are to deny that it actually happened. And, even when the death of loved ones comes after a long life, the idea that at least they lived a good, long life does not eradicate our sorrow at their absence. The injustice of death makes us struggle to come up with words to say to someone in a sympathy card or at a funeral. “I’m sorry for your loss” feels empty and cliché and yet better than not saying anything at all. On a political level, the shocking death tolls from the conflicts around us overwhelm us making us speechless. And, despite its inevitability, we avoid the topic of our own death in everyday conversation. The silence evoked by death in all its forms is thus found not only in the way we might abstain from the subject, but also in the fact that the words that are spoken feel bereft of meaning, as if they were nothing.

In this paper, I will argue that art fills in the space left empty by normal language by speaking its own language about death. And while it is no surprise philosophically or experientially that art helps us bear death, I will offer an additional perspective on this by linking the way art speaks out of a general silence to the way it speaks out of the particular silence felt in experiences of personal and political death. To do so, I will first present how art arises out of silence, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and relate this to the silence of death. Next, I will describe the powerful vocabulary that art uses to speak to death drawing on illustrations found in the art of the French existentialists. Lastly, I will conclude that it is the uncompromising message of art which refuses to soften reality while also calling us to action that makes it possible for us to bear the reality of death. As a note, when I say that art has the ability to do something, I do not mean that every single piece of art does this, but rather that art, as a practice, has this capacity. The characteristics discussed in this paper are not necessarily found (nor should they be found) in each individual work of art.

Conference Presentation: An Explication of Aesthetic Freedom with Implications for Mental Health

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I presented at the Psychology and the Other Conference at Boston College in September 2025. This conference is always a joy! It is also exciting to see my book being sold at the book exhibit since it is part of the Psychology and Other Book Series.

Here is an abstract of the paper:

In promoting strong mental health, we desire each individual to walk in a state of freedom. Freedom becomes then a goal or ideal that we encourage in our patients and all those around us. And yet, due to its familiarity, we must not forget what it looks like when freedom is deprived, when we are trapped in some kind of bondage, captivity or slavery. To walk in freedom means decidedly not to be enslaved to something or someone and not to be owned by another or controlled by something else. Thinking in terms of art, we know intuitively that art cannot be done under coercion or dictated by another nor can it be done for the sake of an agenda or to spread propaganda. Art may arise out of bondage, and often does, but art cannot be created by the slavery; any art made by those in captivity transcends the bounds of that slavery.

In this paper, I will explicate aesthetic freedom — in other words, I will look to expressions of freedom in art — in order to apply this kind of freedom to goals in mental health. To do so, I will perform a phenomenological analysis on the freedom that exists in art to find its necessary place. I will sketch the relation of art to freedom according to the existentialist accounts of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Camus and Gabriel Marcel. Keenly aware of the experience of bondage due to living through the occupation of France during the Second World War, the existentialists see freedom as saturating all creation of art (such as the writing of a novel or the painting of a still life) and all participation in art (such as the reading of the novel or the viewing of a still life painting) just like it saturates all actions of the human life. Although each thinker heralds freedom as essential to art and life, there are tensions that abound in their accounts of freedom with some privileging an autonomous style of freedom (“radical freedom”) while others emphasizing freedom dependent on others (“situated freedom”). In the larger chapter, I describe how freedom must be present at each layer of the aesthetic experience: in the act of the artist, in the experience of the audience and in the artwork itself, but for this paper, we will be looking solely at the freedom for the artist.

Chair at Foucault and Phenomenology Conference

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I had the privilege of chairing a session at the Foucault and Phenomenology Conference in Memphis, Tennessee in March 2025. It was put on by The Southern Journal of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. Here is a link to the program.

Not only was it incredible to discuss Foucault’s relation to phenomenology with scholars from around the world, but it was a privilege to introduce and monitor the session of Philippe Sabot, an internationally recognized scholar in Foucault. In fact, his work encouraged me while I was writing my dissertation that a connection between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault could be established.

In my introduction, I said, “I first heard Philippe Sabot speak with Frederic Gros and Daniele Lorenzini in the basement of the bibliothèque marguerite in Paris in 2017. I was living there at the time working on my dissertation on Merleau-Ponty and Foucault and his work inspired me that I was perhaps on the right track to argue that there is a possible and even fruitful dialogue between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault.”

His title was: “From phenomenology to archaeology: Foucault with Merleau-Ponty.”