What Could History Have Been?

Imagining new approaches to the humanities

“What could history have been?” The question asks how events might have turned out otherwise, if only X had happened instead of Y. What if JFK hadn’t been assassinated? What if Hitler had? The official term for this kind of what-if thinking is “counterfactual history,” and it covers anything from ...

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What Could History Have Been?

Refugee Movements and the Crisis of Europe

Theoretical Interventions

This panel discussion probes this crisis from a theoretical perspective and discusses its political implications by asking: What follows from this crisis for the European project, the paradoxes of international law, the role of the nation-state, and the resurgence of nationalism? And how does the emergence of new political practices and subjectivities ...
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Refugee Movements and the Crisis of Europe

What the Performative Can’t Perform

On Judith Butler

Judith Butler's Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard, 2015) is a series of occasional pieces which, taken together, show both the extraordinary range of her thought, and perhaps also some of its limitations. Here her thinking extends from questions of gender performativity, seen as an instance of precarity ...
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What the Performative Can’t Perform

2016 Heuss Lecture: The Dialectics of Progress

Rahel Jaeggi

How should we conceive of social change and moral progress? How do they come about? How are the two phenomena related to each other and how can they be evaluated—as change for the better? These are questions which have repeatedly preoccupied contemporary philosophical discussion and which seem to be indispensable for a critical ...
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2016 Heuss Lecture: The Dialectics of Progress

Vision and Reality in Bernie’s Revolution

“And the children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a land.” (Edward Lear, 1945) A certain classic exposition on moral political thought holds that men acquire control and certainty about their world and their own existence through justice, and that humans’ knowledge of the world is inseparable from their own ...
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Vision and Reality in Bernie’s Revolution

The Business of Being Made

Two weeks ago The New School’s Ferenczi Center hosted Katie Gentile and a panel of contributors to celebrate the launch of a new book and a new series. The book, The Business of Being Made: The Temporalities of Reproductive Technologies in Psychoanalysis and Culture, is the first to critically analyze ...
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The Business of Being Made