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2020-21 Speaker Series

Each year The Speaker Series brings in several visiting guest lecturers. Speakers over the years have included Jean Baudrillard, Lauren Berlant, Peter Brooks, Norman Bryson, David Carroll, Anthony Cascardi, Wlad Godzich, Jean-Joseph Goux, Elizabeth Grosz, N. Katherine Hayles, Linda Hutcheon, Martin Jay, Michael Hardt, Agnes Heller, Barbara Johnson, David Farrell Krell, Murray Krieger, Arthur Kroker, Dominick LaCapra, Jerome McGann, J. Hillis Miller, Chantal Mouffe, Christopher Norris, Mark Poster, Richard Rorty, Charles Scott, Thomas Sebeok, Kaja Silverman, Gayatri Spivak, Bernard Stiegler, Samuel Weber, Hayden White, Slavoj Žižek, and many others.

Watch some of our previous talks on youtube!

Upcoming speakers:

Fall 2020

Dr. Thomas Bedorf

Institut für Philosophie, FernUniversität in Hagen

"Militant Liberalism"

Neither in political theory nor in political practice the universalist narrative of liberalism’s power for extending and guaranteeing freedom still applies without being questioned. A liberal response to these challenges could be the idea of affirming the contingency of liberal convictions. Critical challenges give rise to criteria that must be met by such liberalism, if it wants to persist in the agonal conflict of political cultures. As a trial, Richard Rorty's ironic liberalism and the underlying tradition of pragmatist democratic theory are used to gain clues for an agonal, contingency-conscious, but militantly affirmative liberalism.