TRANSFORMING SOLIDARITIES LECTURE SERIES
Thursday, 23. June 2022, 6-8 pm | Institute for European Ethnology
, Room 311
, Möhrenstr. 40/41, Berlin

›Beyond Trauma and Capture: The Organisational Infrastructure of Solidarity‹

Transforming Solidarities proudly presents the first of three talks in their Lecture Series with Rodrigo Nunes:

Solidarity appears caught today between two conditions. On the one hand, it has never been so easy to express it: support for the most varied causes is just one click away. On the other, the attempt to give it a constant, organised collective form continues to be viewed with suspicion, tainted as it is with associations with “speaking on behalf of others” and the vanguardist politics of yore. Thus, the latter condition (the “trauma of organisation” that arises from the negative experiences of the 20th century) reinforces the dangers of the former (the capture of solidarity within the circuits of a spectacular or communicative capitalism in which being politically active is replaced with being seen as being politically active). In this talk, I intend to critically assess the negative, traumatic associations that concepts like “solidarity” and “organising” elicit in order to propose a different way of approaching them, and hopefully clear a path for thinking the organisational infrastructure that solidarity requires in order to be effective.

Rodrigo Nunes is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and author of Organisation of the Organisationless: Collective Action After Networks (Mute, 2014) and Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation (Verso, 2021).

Download Poster here.