Book Launch | The Art of Revolt: Snowden, Assange, Manning
NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis invite you to join for a talk with French philosopher and sociologist Geoffroy de Lagasnerie on his new book, The Art of Revolt: Snowden, Assange, Manning (Stanford University Press, September 2017). The author will be in conversation with Nikhil Singh and Andrew Ross.
Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning are key figures in the struggles playing out in our democracies over internet use, state secrets, and mass surveillance in the age of terror. When not decried as traitors, they are seen as whistle-blowers whose crucial revelations are meant to denounce a problem or correct an injustice. Yet, for Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, they are much more than that. Snowden, Assange, and Manning are exemplars who have reinvented an art of revolt. Consciously or not, they have inaugurated a new form of political action and a new identity for the political subject.
Anonymity as practiced by WikiLeaks and the flight and requests for asylum of Snowden and Assange break with traditional forms of democratic protest. Yet we can hardly dismiss them as acts of cowardice. Rather, as Lagasnerie suggests, such solitary choices challenge us to question classic modes of collective action, calling old conceptions of the state and citizenship into question and inviting us to reformulate the language of critical philosophy. In the process, he pays homage to the actions and lives of these three figures.
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Professor at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy, is a French philosopher and sociologist who has been called one of the most influential thinkers in contemporary French culture.
Andrew Ross is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. A contributor to The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, and Al Jazeera, he is the author of many books, including Bird On Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City, and The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town. He is a founding member of the Gulf Labor Coalition, an international group of artists, curators, and writers focused on improving labor conditions at the Guggenheim’s Abu Dhabi museum.
Nikhil Singh is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. His areas of research include race, empire and culture in 20th-century U.S and, more specifically, black radicalism and US liberalism. He is also the director of NYU’s Prison Education Program.