Stefanos Geroulanos (NYU) discusses his recent book with

Alberto Toscano and Svenja Bromberg

3-5pm
12 June 2018
Richard Hoggart Building 137a

Between 1945 and 1985, academics, artists, revolutionaries, and state functionaries spoke of transparency in pejorative terms. Associating it with the prying eyes of totalitarian governments, they undertook a critical project against it—in education, policing, social psychology, economic policy, and the management of information. Focusing on Sartre, Lacan, Canguilhem, Lévi-Strauss, Leroi-Gourhan, Foucault, Derrida, and others, Transparency in Postwar France (Stanford UP, 2017) explores the work of ethicists, who proposed that individuals are transparent neither to each other nor to themselves, and philosophers, who clamored for new epistemological foundations. These decades saw the emergence of the colonial and phenomenological “other,” the transformation of ideas of normality, and the effort to overcome Enlightenment-era humanisms and violence in the name of freedom. These thinkers’ innovations remain centerpieces for any resistance to contemporary illusions that tolerate or enable power and social coercion.

In this symposium, Stefanos Geroulanos will be joined by respondents Alberto Toscano and Svenja Bromberg to discuss his book and its ramifications for how we understand many of the major conceptual innovations from postwar France that we have otherwise taken for granted.

**Limited copies of the book will be available for purchase at this event.**

Stefanos Geroulanos is Associate Professor of European History and Director of the Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences at New York University. He is the author of An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, 2010).