Listening for Political Freedom

Might liberal democracy be a historically exhausted form, incapable of addressing predicaments global in nature, extending beyond humans, or carrying residuals of long histories of damage?  Predicaments of the climate and biodiversity emergencies? Of the unprecedented transnational powers of capital?  Of the political deformations and inequalities that are the legacies of EuroAtlantic empire? 

Global problems, lingering damages, narrowing futures, nonhuman life-- these have never been democracy’s strong suits.  This lecture adumbrates “reparative democracy” as a possible successor to liberal democracy and democratic socialism.  It focuses on one element, political freedom, and one aspect of freedom, listening.  It draws wisps and whispers of Hegel into the project.

Wendy Brown is UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.  She is also Professor emeritus of Political Science and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley.  The author and editor of more than a dozen books, she is best known for her interrogation of identity politics and state power in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity; her critical analysis of tolerance in Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire; her account of the global political inter-regnum in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty; and her study of neoliberalism’s multi-pronged assault on democratic principles, institutions and citizenship in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. Her most recent book, Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber, reflects on other forces corroding democratic politics and education. A member of the American Academy and a Guggenheim Fellow, Brown has also held a variety of visiting professorships and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages.  She credits her thinking life to the excellent and accessible public universities of her youth and has worked in recent years to prevent their extinction. 

Welcoming adress

Verena Blechinger-Talcott
First Vice President of Freie Universität Berlin

Instroduction

Robin Celikates
Institute of Philosophy of Freie Universität Berlin 

The event is in English.

Wendy Brown offers a workhop for a limited number of M.A. students and doctoral candidates in the humanities on the day after the Hegel Lecture. Prerequisite for participatiation in the workshop is attendance of the Hegel Lecture “Listening for Political Freedom” on December 11th. Further info.