Stathis Gourgouris: Can Democracy Not Be Secular?

Public lecture, March 20th, 2014

Date: 20 March, 2014, Thursday

Time: 16:00 – 18:00

Location: Sweelinckzaal, Drift 21, Utrecht

Registration: cfh@uu.nl

Democracy is assumed to be a Western phenomenon dependent on a specific history of secularization and modernity. Disastrous attempts to "export democracy" as ideological justifications of imperialist interests have exacerbated this narrow view. Yet, the bottom line of definition for democracy is society's equal participation in determining its political autonomy. At this bottom line, can the otherwise irreducible markers of social difference (class, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, etc.) stand above the equal share of political decision making? Answering this question cannot involve making exceptions for specific societies, specific histories, specific geographies, specific traditions. Hence, if democracy is of Western provenance or not is irrelevant, for, whatever the social-cultural tradition, the matter boils down to the same thing: whether a society can break down its own traditions of internal exclusion and external authority and assume the responsibility of equally shared decisions as to how to account for its past, how to determine its present, and how to envision its future.

Stathis Gourgouris is a Professor and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature & Society, Columbia Univer-sity, US. He writes and teaches on a variety of subjects, ultimately entwined around questions of the poetics and politics of modernity and democracy. He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (1996), Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (2003), Lessons in Secular Criticism (2013) and editor of Freud and Fundamentalism (2010). He is currently completing work on two other projects of secular criticism: The Perils of the One andNothing Sacred. He is also an internationally awarded poet and he writes regularly in internet media (such as Al Jazeera, The Immanent Frame, Re-Public), as well as major Greek newspapers and journals on political and literary matters.

A podcast interview about his latest book Lessons in Secular Criticism for the Los Angeles Book Review can be found here:

Watch Prof. Gourgouris’ keynote lecture “Musical Dis-Possesions” at Edward Said Memorial Conference 2013 here:http://youtu.be/_PdjQkH1IvY