COM Lecture Series: The Minimal Affirmation as the Determination of the Scholar in Miserable Times

In 1990, faced with a peculiarly deadened conjuncture of seemingly endless conformity the German-Italian thinker Johannes Agnoli wrote an important intervention entitled ‘Destruktion als Bestimmung des Gelehrten in dürftiger Zeit’ – ‘destruction as the determination [or purpose] of the scholars in miserable times’. Today, of course, no-one disputes that we live in miserable times, dürftiger Zeit. It’s in fact difficult to imagine worse times, more connected to a sense of total disorientation, not only for the dominant order and its iron-clad belief in law and order, but also for the critical humanities. Faced with our ‘miserable times’ it often seems that critique has exhausted its function, dissipated its strength of refusal into new positivisms, and created an edgeless, impotent form of thought seamlessly conforming to the state and capital despite its pretenses to dissent from the dominant order. Is there another path for critique? Is there anywhere to discover the possibility of a minimal affirmation that might provide a beacon of orientation, despite the return of so many pre-critical conceptions today of thought, humanity, belonging, nationality, language, history and more? Is there anything other in the conjuncture than the path of negation, refusal, and the ‘ban on positivity’? We will investigate certain possibilities for the theoretical humanities today of Agnoli’s demand for destruction and for the explosive return of the force of doubt, cross-reading them with another subversive figure to our miserable times, that of the ‘poetic intervenor’ in Alain Badiou’s reading of Hölderlin.

Gavin Walker is Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where he specializes in critical theory, modern intellectual history, politics and aesthetics. He is the author or editor of numerous books and articles, including The Sublime Perversion of Capital (Duke, 2016), Marx et la politique du dehors (Lux, 2022), The End of Area: Biopolitics, Geopolitics, History (Duke, 2019, with Naoki Sakai), The Red Years (Verso, 2020), Foucault’s Late Politics (Duke, 2022), and others. One of the editors of the Historical Materialism book series (Brill/Haymarket), his new book, The Rarity of Politics: Passages from Structure to Subject is forthcoming from Verso.