Department seminar: Abou Farman
The Department of Social Anthropology is happy to announce the upcoming seminar with Abou Farman, Associate Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research. The title of the lecture is "The Future Inevitable, The Future Terminal - The Secular Tense of Technoscience at the End of the World".
Main content
Seminar paper
I have been concerned with the contemporary politics generated by sensibilities or imaginaries of futurelessness. For some people caught up in the nexus of extermination, extinction and precarity that is not a new prospect. But futurelessness – a term I borrow from the psychologist Robert Lifton who used to characterize the condition of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – has become part of a global discourse and global concern, not just in media, but in the circuits of expertise and scientific authority as well as policy and state politics. As the unpredicatibilities of social and planetary convulsions are increasingly read, and felt, as warning signs of an inevitable doom, or collapse, so the calculus of life and death, of generations and regenerations, is changing shape, vocabularies, geographies, and populations.
Terminality is the concept I use to try and characterize and analyze these contemporary changes. Juxtaposed with this vision of the inevitable, are the continued promises of growth and progress via technoscience (captured by projects such as physical immortality and space colonies) projecting and developing posthuman futures as inevitable. On both sides, the sense of inevitability is changing the open and free future promised by modernity and secular humanism. This talk will explore the scenes and grammars of inevitability, and their effect on contemporary political ideologies.
About the lecturer
Abou Farman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research. Read more about him here.