【题目】一种现代激情：狂热与政治

（A Modern Passion: Fanaticism and Politics）

【演讲人】Alberto Toscano

伦敦大学社会学系

【主持人】汪晖 教授

【时间】2011年4月18日（周一）下午三点

【地点】新斋353室

【语种】英语

【主办单位】清华大学人文与社会科学高等研究所

【内容简介】

In the history of Western philosophy and politics, the idea of fanaticism has played a distinctive and symptomatic role. Linked to religious extremism and group irrationality in the early Enlightenment, it was used by reactionary intellectuals after the French revolution to condemn what they depicted as a dangerous excess of rationality. Liberalism presented itself from the start as a domestication of political passions by commercial interests, and in its political forms frequently pitted itself against the 'fanaticisms' of the lower orders and of colonised peoples.

Today, political powers often try to gain their legitimacy from demonising external 'fanatics' and preventing internal resurgences of fanaticism. This talk will propose that rather than simply expelling fanaticism from politics - a move with invariably depoliticising effects - we can still learn from the attempts by the likes of Kant, Hegel or Marx to think the deep ties between abstract emancipatory ideals (equality, freedom,justice) and passionate collective action. In other words, to think of fanaticism not as some kind of social pathology deriving from religious or mass irrationality, but as an internal dimension, both dangerous and necessary, of transformative political activity.

 

Toscano博士是出生于前苏联的意大利学者，目前任教于伦敦大学。出版有The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006)和Fanaticism: The Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010)等多部专著，其中，后者的中译本将在近期出版。