Lecture hosted by the Department of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research.
When collective projects seem exhausted, when people feel incapacitated, and historicity proper seems to have come to an end, this manifests subjectively as a lack of courage. Such is the diagnosis repeatedly articulated in the history of modern philosophy. The historical conjuncture is then determined by a politics and an administration of fear, wherein individual and collective decision-making does not follow (from) affirmative principles but is mainly driven by what – catastrophes or calamities – one hopes to avoid. Against this background, the lecture will mobilize a series of modern thinkers to think through the possible contours of an affirmative concept of courage for times of collective incapacitation.