2008

 

Renata Salecl
Slovenian philosopher and sociologist

Tyranny of Choice: How We Become Who We Are

Salecl discusses her book in progress, an analysis into why late capitalist insistence on choice increases feeligns of anxiety and guilt. "In the Western world," Salecl writes, "people are not only under the impression that there are endless possibilities to find fulfillment in life, but they are also encouraged to be some kind of self-creators, i.e., they are supposedly free to choose what they want to be. In this highly industrialized society, which allegedly gives priority to the individual's freedoms over submission to group causes, people, however, face an important anxiety-provoking dilemma: "Who Am I for Myself?"

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Max Kade Lecture at Boston University:
The Legacy of 1968: A European Perspective

Daniel Cohn-Bendit
German Politician and Member, European Parliament; Co-president of the European Greens/European Free Alliance Group.

Introduction: Stanley Hoffmann
Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard University

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Our Innocence, Foreign Perversions: Gender and Sexuality in Nationalist Discourse

Agnieszka Graff
Polish writer, translator, feminist and human rights activist. Since 2000, Graff has been an assistant professor at the Center for American Studies at the University of Warsaw. She published her best-selling first book, ?wiat bez kobiet (A World without Women) in 2001.

 

Ethics of Atheism

Paolo Flores D'Arcais
Italian philosopher and editor-in-chief of MicroMega

Alan Wolfe
Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College

Fiction and Possibility

Magdalena Tulli
Polish author and translator

Lawrence Weschler
Writer and Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University

In cooperation with the literary journal AGNI