Simon Critchley delivers a lecture entitled Barack Obama and the American Void. He examines Obama's subjectivity, the existential detachment that seems to haunt him, and its relation to democracy.
Bio
Simon Critchley
Simon Critchley was born in Hertfordshire in 1960, and currently lives and works in New York as Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He works in continental philosophy, the history of philosophy, literature, ethics and politics.
Critchley argues that philosophy commences in disappointment, either religious or political. These two axes may be said largely to inform his published work: religious disappointment raises the question of meaning and has to, as he sees it, deal with the problem of nihilism; political disappointment provokes the question of justice and raises the need for a coherent ethics. The Book of Dead Philosophers is his eighth book.
Carin Kuoni
Carin Kuoni is the director of the Vera List Center at The New School. An art historian by education, and a curator and critic by practice, Kuoni was previously director of exhibitions at Independent Curators International (ICI) and director of the Swiss Institute New York.
She has curated and co-curated over twenty international exhibitions, and has written for a number of international publications.
Form of government in which supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodic free elections. In a direct democracy, the public participates in government directly (as in some ancient Greek city-states, some New England town meetings, and some cantons in modern Switzerland). Most democracies today are representative. The concept of representative democracy arose largely from ideas and institutions that developed during the European Middle Ages and the Enlightenment and in the American and French Revolutions. Democracy has come to imply universal suffrage, competition for office, freedom of speech and the press, and the rule of law. See alsorepublic.
NOW SEPT 2010, Obama is the all time messanger of death, drone killings daily, Obama not facing up to Immigration from Mexico threatening Arizona. Americas Homeland se3curity now compared to Nazi S.S Gestapo, spying on citizens, Intelligence deptment now 850,000 employees, 6ooo private corporations, 900 bases around the world, and WikileaKS TELLING THE TRUTH. bELEIF IS THE FAnTASY OF YOUR OWN MIND, SELF INFLICTED WOUND LIKE THE lUSITANA FIRST WORLD WAR, SET UP TO GET INTO THE BATTLE, MAYBE 911 WAS ALSO FRIENDLY FIRE!? tIME tells all!
Great talk. Thank goodness Obama won, because he is right, we would have been royally screwed if McCain and Palin won. Not that I am saying Obama is perfect, as no one is, but I think our country would have been subject to some major long term problems if he did not win. I have to say if Palin hadn't been in the picture, it would have been a lot closer of a race. McCain definitely ruined his chances choosing her.