Fiction Series: Humiliation & Power (Part III)

Hi everyone!

Please join us on July 23rd for the final discussion of Wayne Koestenbaum’s Humiliation in conjunction with excerpts from Judith Butler’s seminal work on subjection/subjectivity, The Psychic Life of Power.

You do not have to have joined previously to join us for Part III!

For this meeting, we will be reading the following:

• Humiliation by Wayne Koestenbaum, Fugues #9-11 (pages 125-end) in the Picador edition)
• Chapter 5 and 6 of The Psychic Life of Power by Judith Butler, pages 151-198 (I have attached here the entire book, but only Chapters 5-6 are required for the third meet up. Please be sure to read Phillips’s commentary and Butler’s response, at the end of chapter 5)

Unfortunately, there is not a publicly available copy of Humiliation, so if anyone would really like to read this with us and is having trouble with access, please let me know. Both the Picador and Notting Hill editions are popular.

Some questions we’ll be thinking about:

• Can humiliation be self-defining? Or self-effacing?
• Is humiliation similar in nature to Butler’s discussion of subjection and the formation of the subject?
• Is humiliation a creative force, just as much as it might be a destructive one?
• In what ways can humiliation be a failure of social performance?
• Have our minds become sociopolitical landscapes (have they been anything else)? If so, are those political landscapes ones which shape what is humiliating, and by extension, our character?
• Is loss a kind of becoming?

Additionally, Humiliation deals with some hefty topics–if there is something that anyone does not feel comfortable talking about in a broader forum, please let me know privately ahead of time and I will ensure we steer clear of that.

We’ll be meeting at 7pm on July 23rd at Spritzenhaus33 in Williamsburg. If you have any other questions or difficulty finding us, feel free to message me.

See you there!