Public lecture as part of the project Posthuman Ethics: Reimagining the Art of Living.

In this lecture, Professor Janae Scholtz addresses the disturbing rise of fascism in many parts of the world and the frightening acceptance of genocidal strategies in the name of freedom, agency and self-defense. Given this, she argues that it may be time to reconsider the language of politics itself. Her presentation thus takes aim at the limitations of the concepts of freedom and agency as the hallowed values of liberal politics, human rights, and concepts of sovereignty. She argues that these much-hailed values are themselves harbingers of the kind of totalizing and hypostasizing prerogatives which lend themselves to fascist violence and self-centeredness that suspends the possibility of compassion. For her, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze offers the means to operate at the limits of these concepts (or beyond), and to re-align political language and thought towards ontological relationality and compassionate recognition of our shared experience of chaos, irrationality, and indeterminacy – the suffering and pain of existence. 

Professor Janae Sholtz is a Fulbright Specialist and visiting Professor from Alvernia University. She is the author of The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political (2015). Sholtz has published research in the areas of Continental philosophy, feminist theory, philosophy of art, posthumanism, and social and political philosophy. She has a strong interest in aesthetic practices and how the affects created through these practices contribute to a new ethos that can be shared and transmitted on social and political levels.