Politics and Passions

Virtual

This episode explores what it means to think about passions, affect, and atmospheric solidarities in politics. At what point does politics exceed the calculation of interests?  How do we think about contradictory interests and conflicting fantasy investments when investigating our current political worlds? How can we repurpose ideology to understand its relation to affect? How do visions premised on reasoned judgment and rational deliberation fall short in analyzing the present? How do revolutionary energies and efforts at political retrenchment play out differently in the streets and in cyberspace? How might a theory of democracy look different when passions and polarization are adequately taken into account?

Speaker Profiles

Lisa Wedeen

Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and the College and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. Her publications include three books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999; with a new preface, 2015); Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (2008); and her award-winning Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019). She is currently completing an edited volume with Joseph Masco entitled Conspiracy/Theory and beginning work on a volume on cosmopolitanism (with Prathama Banerjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sanjay Seth). She is also writing a monograph on interpretive methods.

Prathama Banerjee

Prathama Banerjee is a historian at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.  Her interests lie in political philosophy, history of concepts and literary/cultural studies.  She had earlier written a book called Politics of Time (Oxford University Press, 2006) which analyzed how universal chronology came to be imposed upon the world in colonial modernity through the work of calendars, credit markets, labour, fiction and philosophy, rendering some people as constitutively primitive and backward. Her new book Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South is set to come out in December 2020 from Duke University Press and studies how the modern political concepts of self, action, ideology and people came to be fashioned late 19th to mid-20th century India.  She is passionate about politics but equally about music and cooking, all three of which, she believes, defy language and often take us by surprise!