Stephen Garrett
Rivendell Institute at Yale University
Stephen Garrett, PhD is a Senior Fellow at the Rivendell Institute at Yale University and Curriculum Vice President for Global Scholars. He was formerly an associate professor of Philosophy and Religion at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Religion at the European Humanities University, a Belarussian University in exile also in Vilnius. His teaching and research with Lithuanian and East European artists opened him to their historic suffering and current struggle to live between the social realism of the past and the late modern, democratic capitalism of the present. At the heart of these transitions are questions concerning God’s identity, human dignity, identity, creativity, and freedom.
Through the lens of dialogical personalism (i.e., Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Ferdinand Ebner, and others like Mikhail Bakhtin), his research explores how these transitional questions animate the early 20th century avant-garde art movement, Dada, in its various cultural expressions in Switzerland, Germany, France, New York, and Russia. In doing so, he hopes to offer a more generative reading that reconfigures our philosophical and theological understanding of Dada’s epistemological and ethical potentialities at the nexus of the broader conversation on art and the political. Parallel to this research trajectory involves his early interest in Hans Urs von Balthasar, specifically how dialogical personalism shaped Balthasar’s theological personalism and his aesthetics.
The Difference of Indifference: Marcel Duchamp and the Possibilities of Dialogical Personalism