Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network (New Books in Philosophy)
Host: Sarah Tyson
Guest: Mariana Ortega, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Latina/Latino Studies at Penn State
Book Discussed: Carnalities: The Art of Living in Latinidad (Duke UP, 2024)
Original Air Date: December 16, 2025

Main Theme:
The episode centers on Mariana Ortega’s Carnalities: The Art of Living in Latinidad, which explores how creative practices—especially photography—affect racialization, subjectivity, and lived experiences in Latinidad. Ortega develops a theory of “carnal aesthetics,” moving beyond the visual and rational to include bodily, emotional, and communal registers of experience, artmaking, and memory. The conversation is deeply interdisciplinary, combining existentialism, phenomenology, Latina feminism, and personal narrative.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Ortega’s Intellectual Journey

• Beginning in Existentialism: Ortega traces her earliest philosophical fascination to Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus (04:33), linking existential questions of suffering, meaning, and death to her own experience fleeing war in Nicaragua.
• Encounter with Critical Phenomenology & Latina Feminism:
  Reading Maria Lugones and Latina/Black feminists profoundly reoriented her philosophical practice:

  “That was the biggest transformation in my intellectual life. It was a reorientation... I could never do philosophy the same way.” (07:14)

• From Theory to Lived Experience:
  Ortega connects her migration, marginality, and personal struggles to a philosophical inquiry about art’s role in survival, memory, and transformation.

Defining “Carnal Aesthetics”

• Against Disinterestedness: Rejects traditional (“18th-century”) aesthetics as “disinterested.”

  “I don’t mean aesthetics as disinterestedness, but rather as very much interestedness... mediated through perception.” (11:20)

• Embodied & Intimate:
  “Carnal” references not raw flesh, but the intimate, bodily attunement between perceiver and perceived, drawing on Anzaldúa and Merleau-Ponty.
• Creativity as Survival:
  Art is not for museums: it’s for sense-making, relief, and self-making, especially for those in-between cultures and categories:

  “She’s developing herself and also learning to live with the pain caused by this life of in-betweenness. That’s what I mean by a carnal aesthetics: attunement to the world…” (15:09)

From the Eye (Vision) to the Mouth (Embodied Sensuousness)

• Colonial Gaze and Ocularcentrism:
  Ortega begins with the dominance of the visual in Western and colonial epistemology—how photography and vision serve as tools for objectification, racialization, and colonial control:

  “Photography, since its inception, has been tied to... the ontological production of new kinds of beings... undermining them.” (18:27)

• Critical Phenomenology:
  Builds upon thinkers like Linda Alcoff and Alia Al-Saji to explore how vision is affective and habitual, not simply rational or neutral (21:35).
• Limits of the Eye:
  Shifts from the “eye” to the full range of embodied perception, foregrounding “mouthly” experience (taste, breath, speech). Gloria Anzaldúa’s line is cited:

  “Todo pasava por esa boca: el viento, el agua, la tierra... the whole world can pass through a mouth.” (34:14)

Auto Arte and Carnal Crossings

• Gloria Anzaldúa – Creative Praxis as Survival:
  Auto arte is described as the process where marginalized creatives reassemble fragmented selves through art in response to trauma (“arrivatos”—daily shocks), violence, and exclusion (28:05).
• Laura Aguilar – Photography as Self-Reclamation:
  Aguilar, a Chicana lesbian photographer, uses the camera to remake herself against social expectations:

  “I explain how Laura Aguilar gives birth to herself by way of her photography... she connects to the world... developing an intimacy with that world.” (39:54)

The Second Half: Migration, Mourning, Listening to Photos

• Border Crossings and Community:
  Ortega shifts to immigration, especially the deadly US-Mexico border crossing, using non-art photographs—objects found with deceased migrants—to illustrate loss, memory, and collective sorrow (43:32).
• Listening to Photographs (Tina Campt):
  Inspired by Campt’s “listening to images,” Ortega emphasizes attunement to photographs’ emotional frequencies, not just visual content:

  “These photographs talked to me, affected me in a sense... I thought they carried so much sorrow...” (45:11)

• Altars of Shoes & Feeling Brown (José Esteban Muñoz):
  Veronica Cardenas’s “Traveling Souls” photo series of migrants’ shoes is read as an “altar for the living,” invoking communal mourning and survival.

  “I see this series of photographs as an archive of Feeling Brown... opening up our affective registers...” (58:03)

Undoing by Aesthetic Experience

• The Abject; Being Undone:
  Ortega describes how encountering a horrific photograph from the Nicaraguan revolution thrusts her into nausea and personal memory, showing how art can “undo” the self and confront us with our histories and limits (63:41).
• Letter to Barthes:
  The chapter ends with a personal letter to Roland Barthes (author of Camera Lucida), situating theory within the emotional and lived realities of violence, mourning, and marginality.

  “I felt betrayed in a sense, and I took it personally... doing theory in the end is not enough, doing discourse is not enough.” (68:39)

Toward a Hermeneutics of Love

• Ortega hints at future work inspired by Chela Sandoval—how philosophy itself could become more “loving,” affecting deeper transformation and connection (76:50).

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Artistic Practice as Self-Making:

  “What Anzaldúa does... is to put the pieces of herself that had been shattered in these moments of [arrivatos]... through the making of art, she starts getting a sense of who she is.” (31:02)

• On Affect and Racialization:

  “There are a lot of discourses, a lot of theories as to how to fight racism. ... But how do you get to those affected modalities of racialization?” (22:31)

• On Listening to Photographs:

  “I thought they carried so much sorrow that I thought of that sorrow as unsettling me.” (45:11)

• On Feeling Brown:

  “…a structure of feeling… a sense that one is a problem… a manner of making community, [...] a brown commons.” (58:03)

• On Being Undone by Art:

  “It was very nauseating. It was a very bodily violent experience... this horror of a photograph disclosed the excess ... it can undo me, it takes you to the limits of the self, of what you can take.” (63:52)

• On Philosophy as Lovingly Transformative:

  “What would it mean to do philosophy lovingly? ... That’s just—I have all these ideas about it. I don’t know if it will happen or not.” (76:50)

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [04:33] – Ortega’s philosophical origins: existentialism and migration
• [11:20] – Definition of “carnal aesthetics”
• [16:56] – Why begin with visuality and the “eye”
• [18:27] – Photography and the colonial gaze
• [28:05] – Gloria Anzaldúa and “auto arte”
• [34:14] – The “mouthly”: embodying perception beyond vision
• [39:54] – Laura Aguilar’s self-naming through photography
• [43:32] – Shifting to migration and images of border crossings
• [45:11] – Listening to photographs; affect, sorrow, and unsettlement
• [54:26] – Veronica Cardenas’s “Traveling Souls” and Feeling Brown
• [61:55] – The affective power of shoes as mnemonic objects
• [63:41] – Being undone by aesthetic violence; letter to Barthes
• [76:50] – Future directions: hermeneutics of love

Conclusion

This rich, evocative conversation traverses deeply personal experiences and abstract theory, arguing that art—particularly photography—enables those rendered marginal by coloniality and racism to reattune, grieve, transform, and persist. Ortega’s “carnal aesthetics” offers listeners a framework for understanding both the trauma and the generativity of Latinx creative practices, pressing philosophy to become more bodily, affective, and loving.

Recommended Action:
Explore Ortega’s Carnalities for a model of interdisciplinary philosophy that is as self-revealing as it is analytically rigorous, and seek out the works of the artists discussed for a direct aesthetic encounter.