Talk

BFA Visual & Critical Studies and Honors Program present political theorist Robyn Marasco, in conversation with Jeremy Cohan, social theorist and director of the Honors Program. They will sketch the historical context, main arguments and contemporary relevance of Leo Lowenthal’s and Norbert Guterman’s landmark text of Critical Theory, Prophets of Deceit. They will explore its typology of political responses to socio-economic crises, its treatment of susceptibility to fascist propaganda as symptomatic of real maladies to which agitators can only provide quack cures, and its influence on Theodor W. Adorno’s analysis of fascist propaganda. They will thread throughout reflections on the results of the 2024 US Presidential Election, and understanding the urgent American situation today.

Robyn Marasco is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, as well as an Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research. Her research has focused on the distinctive contributions of critical theory, feminism, and psychoanalysis to the study of politics. Her first book, The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory after Hegel (Columbia UP, 2015), reconstructs the emancipatory project of critical theory around the idea of negative dialectics. Her articles have appeared in leading journals in the humanities and social sciences, including the American Journal of Political Science, Political Theory, PS, Contemporary Political Theory, New German Critique, boundary2, Philosophy & Social Criticism, and Constellations. Professor Marasco was the guest editor of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on “The Authoritarian Personality” and guest co-editor, with Banu Bargu, of a special issue of Rethinking Marxism on “The Political Encounter with Louis Althusser”. She has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and at the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale University. Her current book project, Toward a Political Theory of the Family, pursues a distinctly political interpretation of the family in twentieth-century critical theory. Professor Marasco is co-editor of Polity, Journal of Political Science.