"Nihilistic Times": Wendy Brown in conversation with Jana Bacevic

How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? In this event, Wendy Brown, one of the preeminent political theorists of her generation, places nihilism at the centre of these predicaments. Emerging from European modernity’s replacement of God and tradition with science and reason, nihilism removes the foundation on which values, including that of truth itself, stand. It politicizes knowledge and reduces the political sphere to displays of narcissism and irresponsible power plays. It renders the profound trivial, the future unimportant, and corruption banal.

To consider remedies for this condition, Brown turns to Max Weber who famously decried the effects of nihilism on both scholarly and political life. Through Weber, Brown calls for retrieving knowledge from its politicization without expunging values from research or teaching, and reflects on ways to embed responsibility in radical political action.

Wendy Brown is UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and was for many years Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her latest book, "Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber", is published by Harvard University Press.
Link to new book: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.p...

Jana Bacevic is assistant professor at Durham University, UK and contributing editor at The Philosopher. Her work is in social theory, philosophy of science, and political economy of knowledge production, with particular emphasis on the relationship between epistemological, moral, and political elements.
Website: https://janabacevic.net
Twitter:   / jana_bacevic