Join us for a talk with Benjamin Lewis Robinson (New York University) followed by a reception.
About the Lecture:
Three recent emergencies—the so-called European migrant crisis, the climate emergency, and the COVID-19 pandemic—confirm the impression that modern politics is emergency politics. They also revealed its treacherous shortcomings. The emergency measures taken are inevitably short-term, stop-gap, presentist, parochial, and anthropocentric. Reproducing a dangerously reductive framing of the political scene, the politics of emergency obscures the underlying social, biological, infrastructural, and ecological conditions of need that give rise to emergencies. Engaging the thought of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, Robinson will argue that doing justice to the contemporary scene must begin not top-down with sovereign action but bottom-up with needs. Modern politics is not exhausted in “states of emergency” but must be understood as navigating the irreducible conjunction of need and emergency. Arendt and Agamben share what Robinson calls the dramatic prejudice of political theory. It perpetuates a view of politics as a scene focused on action and actors; agitations that take the form of need are politically insignificant. In contrast, Robinson argues that such agitations precede the political drama and exceed the scope of action. It is the play of exigencies that first provokes the attention of agents and agencies.
About the Speaker:
Benjamin Lewis Robinson is Assistant Professor of German at NYU. His first book, Bureaucratic Fanatics: Modern Literature and the Passions of Rationalization (2019), treats the literary engagement with the bureaucratic transformation of life in the long nineteenth century. A second book Need/Emergency: Political Theater in Exigent Times will come out with Stanford University Press in 2026. In critical engagement with Arendt, who considered theater to be the political art par excellence, it treats works of theater by Jelinek, Büchner, Kleist, and Hölderlin that in different ways challenge theoretical views on the modern political scene. He is currently working on a book on J. M. Coetzee titled Just Fiction. Ben is co-editor of a special issue of The Germanic Review titled “Schuld (guilt/debt) in the Anthropocene” and of the volume The Work of World Literature (2021).
RSVP Required.
