2019 Tanner Lectures to explore ‘Politics and Knowledge in Nihilistic Times’

“Politics and Knowledge in Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber” is the theme of the 2019 Tanner Lectures on Human Values that will be delivered this fall by Wendy Brown of the University of California-Berkeley.

Brown’s first talk, titled “Politics,” will be held on Tuesday, Oct. 22; the second, “Knowledge,” will be on Wednesday, Oct. 23. Both will take place at 5 p.m. in the auditorium of the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St. Brown will be joined by Yale faculty for further discussion at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 24.

Brown is the Class of 1936 First Chair at University of California-Berkeley, where she teaches political theory. Drawing from Freudian, Weberian, Marxist, and Foucauldian angles of vision, Brown writes about the powers operating beneath the surface of liberalism and generating many of its limits and predicaments. She is the author of “States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity,” “Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire,” “Walled States, Waning Sovereignty,” “Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution,” and, most recently, “In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West.” Her work is translated into more than 20 languages, and she has held a number of visiting professorships as well as Guggenheim, ACLS, and Institute for Advanced Study fellowships.

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values were established by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner, who hoped that these lectures would contribute to the intellectual and moral life of humankind. Both the lectures and the discussion are free and open to the public. For more information contact the Whitney Humanities Center at 203-432-0670 or whitneyhumanitiescenter@yale.edu.