【Leading-Edge Lecture 26】States of Dread
【Leading-Edge Lecture 26】
Topic: States of Dread
Speaker: David T. Goldberg (Professor, Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, University of California, Irvine) (Director, University of California, Humanities Research Institute)
Moderator: Sebastian Hsien-hao Liao (Distinguished Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University)
Time: Nov. 9th (Tue.) 10:00-12:00 A.M. (GMT+8)
Venue: Live stream on IHS YouTube channel
Organizer: Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, NTU
Co-organizer: Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, NTU
Signup Link: https://forms.gle/fEThqoVF8kTrXC2N7
Speaker:
Director of the system wide University of California Humanities Research Institute. He is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, Anthropology, and Criminology, Law and Society at UC Irvine. His numerous books include Are We All Postracial Yet? (Polity, 2015), and Dread: Facing Futureless Futures (Polity, July 2021). Earlier in his career, he produced independent films and music videos (some of which aired on MTV), and co-directed an award-winning short film on South Africa, "The Is/land".
Abstract:
Are we in a collective state of social dread? Is dread a driving social sensibility of our time? Since Kierkegaard's largely overlooked essay on dread, and Freud's later work on anxiety, very little has been written directly on the concept of dread. What does the sensibility of dread amount to, and how does it differ from fear? If dread has become a pervasive social sensibility, what are the factors giving rise to and driving it? And what are the politics likely to follow from social states of dread, their implications, and how might they be faced? The talk and discussion will address these questions, in the interest of laying out a social theory of dread today.
