Ricco, John Paul

Biography

Ricco’s research is at the intersection of contemporary art and architecture, queer theory, and contemporary continental philosophy. His first book, The Logic of the Lure (University of Chicago Press, 2003) is the first monograph in queer art history. In it, he combines a close reading of Maurice Blanchot’s philosophy of the outside, with discussions of contemporary queer art and the anonymity, imperceptibility, itinerancy and illicitness of cruising, in order to articulate an ethics and aesthetics of social-sexual promiscuity. In The Decision Between Us: art and ethics in the time of scenes (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Ricco presents an extended theoretical mediation on the space of separation that is intimately shared and sustained in aesthetic and ethical social relations to everyday places and things. With his current book project, The Outside Not Beyond: pornographic faith and the economy of the eve, he is completing the third volume in a trilogy of books on “the intimacy of the outside.” This book is part of a larger research program on “The Risks and Pleasures of Bodily Abandonment and Freedom,” that has received a SSHRC Insight Grant for 2015-19, and that also includes a Research Working Group that Ricco has convened on “Sex, Ethics and Publics.” A second project, on “The Collective Afterlife of Things,” is the focus of his fellowship at the Jackman Humanities Institute, 2015-16.

Research Interest

Contemporary Art; Aesthetics & Ethics; Queer Theory.