Brad Evans: Intolerable Violence

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• published: 07 Jan 2016
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This public lecture by Brad Evans is part of The Distinguished Scholar Speaker Series in Critical Pedagogy at McMaster University. It brings together leading thinkers to explore the development of critical pedagogies and the mobilization of teaching and learning practices towards matters of democracy, social justice, agency, politics, power, culture, and community. "Intolerable Violence" Hannah Arendt argued that once human life technologically conquers terrestrial space, so our ability to gaze back unto the world would render us increasingly remote from ourselves and others. Arendt’s claim has become prophecy. From high-tech knowledge based economies that increasingly define the organizational design of regimes of power to the alienation of many of the worlds citizens, onto the ubiquitous nature of new media broadcasting technologies that quite literally puts the world in our hands without asking for serious philosophical reflection, so the logic of connectivity, ironically, coincides with the death of metaphysics and our belief that we might transform the world for the better. Indeed, as questions of security are firmly displaced by a catastrophic topography of endangerment which insists that everything is insecure by design, we increasingly appreciate how the politics of aesthetics, education, and public pedagogy has become central to political struggle and the cultivation of civic agency. As fundamental questions of what it is to live and learn are increasingly filtered through aesthetic regimes of mediated suffering, such daily spectacles of violence equally reveal the bio-political contours of late liberal rule. This raises critical questions regarding both modes of representation and alternative pedagogies in our insecure times. Not least of which includes the question of how human subjects are educated to tolerate certain representations of violence produced amongst the manufactured simulacrum of media technologies and how, under such conditions, countering accepted states of normalized terror is fundamentally connected to questions of pedagogy and education in the twenty-first century. Dr. Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer whose work specializes in the problem of violence. The author of some ten books and edited volumes, along with over forty academic and media articles, he currently serves as a Senior Lecturer at the School of Sociology, Politics & International Studies, the University of Bristol, UK. Brad is also the founder and director of the Histories of Violence project. In this capacity, he is currently leading a global research initiative on the theme of "Disposable Life" to interrogate the meaning of mass violence in the 21st Century. Previous to this, his co-directed movie "Ten Years of Terror" received international acclaim, screening in the Solomon K. Guggenheim museum, New York, during September 2011. Brad has recently been a visiting fellow at the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, New York (2013-14). Brad regularly writes for prominent news sources such as The Guardian, Independent, LA Review of Books, World Financial Review, Al Jazeera, TruthOut, Counter-Punch and Social Europe. His projects have been featured in various outlets including the New York Times, CBS news, El Pais, and Art Forum to name a few. Brad's latest books include Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of the Spectacle (with Henry Giroux, forthcoming, City Lights: 2015), Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously (with Julian Reid, Polity Press, 2014), Liberal Terror (Polity Press, 2013), and Deleuze & Fascism (with Julian Reid, Routledge, 2013). He is currently working on a number of book projects, including Histories of Violence: An Introduction to Post-War Critical Thought (with Terrell Carver, Zed Books, 2015).