"Since Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro were elected, liberals have tried to put a name to what they are defending from these illiberal leaders. Reason is the value they often settle for. But, as John Roberts argues in "The Reasoning of Unreason", reason is, here, something “given, held onto, and then lost, through the forces of reaction.” This fails to take into account that universalist principles like "reason" are often pretexts for unilateral impositions upon those deemed irrational. Borrowing from Roberts, I would also resist the attempt to talk about a “loss of reason.” Rather than lost, reason “is being given a very different job.” This different job involves rendering weird white and cis pathologies as comprehensible politics."

In this talk Ana Teixeira Pinto will argue that it is not unreason that haunts contemporary politics, but political conservatism, working to recast the interests of a particular group as a commitment to humanism and universal values.

about

Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer and cultural theorist based in Berlin. She is a professor at the HBK Braunschweig and a theory tutor at the Dutch Art Institute. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Third Text, Artforum, Afterall, e-flux journal, Manifesta Journal, and Texte zur Kunst. She is the editor of the book series On the Antipolitical, published by Sternberg Press. Together with Kader Attia and Anselm Franke, she organized the conference and podcast series The White West: Whose Universal, which took place at HKW Berlin.