What’s That Smell?: A Philosophy of the Olfactory

Broadcast 18 March, 2024. Duration: 1 hour 23 minutes

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Why is it that, in Indo-European languages at least, we have no language to describe smells, leaving us (and famously Juliet) no choice but to call the scent of a rose simply “sweet”? In What’s That Smell?, a groundbreaking exploration of the intersection between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the oft-neglected sense of smell, Simon Hajdini sets out to answer this complex question. Through new readings of traditional and modern philosophical texts, Hajdini places smell at the very center of a philosophical critique of the traditional notion of truth, challenging the idea that smell is the antiphilosophical sense par excellence.

Through fresh engagements with fundamental philosophical issues, original analyses of modern literature and film, and the novel use of scientific research into smell within a humanities context, Hajdini situates problems of olfaction at the very point of inception of cultural life. He proposes that ontology, civilization, and capitalist economy alike can be said to amount to “shit management.” And only by following the philosophically most deplorable of the senses, the book argues, can we better understand the central philosophical, psychoanalytical, and political issues of truth, sex, and exploitation.

This online event marks the launch of Simon Hajdini’s latest book What’s That Smell?: A Philosophy of the Olfactory published in March 2024 by MIT Press as part of the Short Circuits series.

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Speakers:

Simon Hajdini is Senior Research Associate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, where he teaches social and political philosophy. He specializes in critical theory, political economy, (hyper)structuralism and psychoanalysis. At present, he is researching and writing on the sensorial politics of social divisions. His latest book is What’s That Smell? A Philosophy of the Olfactory.

William Mazzarella is the Neukom Family Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India, Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity, and The Mana of Mass Society. He is the co-editor, with Raminder Kaur, of Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction and the co-author, with Eric Santner and Aaron Schuster, of Sovereignty Inc: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment. He is also the editor of K D Katrak: Collected Poems.