Theorizing the Present: Ideology, Conspiracy, and The Freedom to Lie

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

Lisa Wedeen

Mary R. Morton Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College, Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and Associate Faculty in Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Based on a wide range of theoretical and rhetorical materials, the paper explores how ideological disavowal works, how conspiracy and critical theory share important elective affinities, and how lying becomes a mode of freedom in its own right. Drawing on lessons gleaned from a long-term theoretical and ethnographic engagement with Middle East politics, this talk “de-provincializes” the region by taking the contemporary United States as a case in point for our understanding of authoritarian dynamics more generally. Current circumstances invite a repurposing of the concept of ideology for the present. They also call for an analysis of the proliferation of conspiratorial thinking. And they underscore the fragility of factual truth for politics.

Attendance is by invitation only.