Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
New York
18 September 2008
Each year an inaugural lecture launches the Vera List Center’s annual theme, defining the intellectual territory that the center will explore in public programs. This year’s theme is Branding Democracy. The lecturer introduces the theme in the broadest sense, serving as a guide to the range and richness of the topic at hand and rooting the concept within The New School’s intellectual tradition.
The inaugural lecture for 2008-09, "Democracy is a Fiction" is offered by Simon Critchley, professor of philosophy, at The New School for Social Research and at University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom. His research focuses on the history of philosophy, literature, ethics, and politics. Critchley will discuss how democracy relies on a series of fictions, most notably the fiction of popular sovereignty as government by and for the people. He argues that such fictions serve an ultimately theological function that must be exposed and criticized. Such is one of the crucial political roles of contemporary art. Critchley will propose the idea of a supreme fiction and invoke another model of democracy closer to the anarchist tradition.
Sponsored by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
A complementary art and design exhibition, “Ours: Democracy in the Age of Branding,” will run from October 15 through January 30 at the Kellen Gallery in the Sheila Johnson Design Center, 2 West 13th Street. Co-produced by Parsons The New School for Design and the Vera List Center, this show includes video, photography, sound, sculpture, and information maps, as well as lectures, performances, and participatory events that happen in a “democratic structure” designed by British artist Liam Gillick.
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