Love thy Neighbour as Thyself? The ‘Neighbour’ and Right-Wing Identity Politics in the West.
Reference to Christianity and to Christian tradition is one of the key ingredients of the expanding right-wing identity politics in Europe (and more largely, in the West), including its more or less explicit nationalism and racism. The commandment to love your Neighbour as yourself obviously presents this politics with a problem and necessitates a (re)interpretation of its meaning. The lecture will look into some examples of this interpretational work, and into how it affects the figure of the Neighbour. At the same time, it will interrogate reasons for which Freud has found this commandment to be at the very core of what he called “discontent” (Unbehagen) in our “civilisation” (Kultur). What is this aggressiveness that tends to emerge together with the figure of the Neighbour, as inseparable from it? To answer this question, the lecture will take recourse to the (Lacanian) psychoanalysis – not in order to steer away from the political dimension of the question, but on the contrary to help us work our way back to its political dimension.
Date:
6 November 2018, 17:00
Venue:
St Antony's College, 62 Woodstock Road OX2 6JF
Venue Details:
Pavilion Room
Speaker:
Prof. Alenka Zupancic (Institute of Philosophy, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts )
Organising department:
The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)
Organisers:
Prof. David Priestland (University of Oxford),
Prof. Faisal Devji (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
faisal.devji@sant.ox.ac.uk
Part of:
Rethinking the Contemporary. The World Since the Cold War
Topics:
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Public
Editor:
David Priestland
