Human Conditions London Review of Books

Adam Shatz presents his series, Human Conditions, in which he’ll be talking separately to three guests – Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards – about some of the most revolutionary thought of the 20th century.

Judith, Pankaj and Brent will each discuss four texts over four episodes, as they uncover the inner life of the 20th century through works that have sought to find freedom in different ways and remake the world around them. They explore, among other things, the development of arguments against racism and colonialism, the experience of artistic expression in oppressive conditions and how language has been used in politically substantive ways.

Authors covered: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, V. S. Naipaul, Ashis Nandy, Doris Lessing, Nadezhda Mandelstam, W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Amiri Baraka and Audre Lorde.

Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz for the first episode of Human Conditions to look at Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 book 'Anti-Semite and Jew', originally published in French as 'Réflexions Sur La Question Juive'. Sartre’s ‘portraits’ of the ‘anti-Semite’ and the ‘Jew’, as he saw them, caused controversy at the time for directly confronting anti-Jewish bigotry in France and how Jewish people had been treated under the Vichy government and before the war.

Judith and Adam discuss Sartre’s attempt to develop a philosophical understanding of this kind of hatred and the apparent moral satisfaction it brings, and his contentious suggestion that not only does the antisemite owe his identity to the Jew, but that 'the Jew' is a creation of the antsemitic gaze. They also consider some of the criticisms levelled at the book, such as its focus on the bourgeois personality, and Sartre’s definition of Jews in entirely negative terms.

NOTE: This episode was recorded on 5 October 2023.

Read more on Sartre in the LRB:

Adam Shatz: Sartre in Cairo
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n22/adam-shatz/one-day-i-ll-tell-you-what-i-think

Jonathan Rée: ‘Being and Nothingness’
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n08/jonathan-ree/peas-in-a-matchbox

Pierre Bourdieu: Sartre
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n22/pierre-bourdieu/sartre

Julian Barnes: Sartre's Flaubert
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n10/julian-barnes/double-bind

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, and Adam Shatz is the the LRB's US editor and author of, most recently, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.

Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz to discuss a landmark in feminist thought, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). Dazzling in its scope, The Second Sex incorporates anthropology, psychology, historiography, mythology and biology to ask an ‘impossible’ question: what is a woman? Focusing on three key chapters, Adam and Judith navigate this dense and dizzying book, exploring the nuances of Beauvoir’s original French phrasing and drawing on Judith’s own experiences teaching and writing about the text. They discuss the book’s startling relevance as well as its stark limitations for contemporary feminism, Beauvoir’s refusal to call herself a philosopher, and the radical possibilities released by her claim that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

Chapters in focus:
Introduction
Biological Data
Myths

Begun as a psychiatric dissertation, Frantz Fanon’s 'Black Skin, White Masks' (1952) became a genre-shattering study of antiblack racism and its effect on the psyche. At turns expressionistic, confessional, clinical, sharply satirical and politically charged, the book is dazzlingly multivocal, sometimes self-contradictory but always compelling. Judith Butler and Adam Shatz, whose biography of Fanon was released in January, chart a course through some of the most explosive and elusive chapters of the book, and show why Fanon is still essential reading.

Chapters in focus:
The Lived Experience of the Black Man
The Black Man and Recognition
By Way of Conclusion

Read more in the LRB:

Adam Shatz: Where Life is Seized
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n02/adam-shatz/where-life-is-seized

Megan Vaughan: 'I am my own foundation'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n20/megan-vaughan/i-am-my-own-foundation

Adam Shatz: On Albert Memmi
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n16/adam-shatz/on-albert-memmi

In the fourth episode of Human Conditions, the last of the series with Judith Butler, we fittingly turn to ‘The Human Condition’ (1956). Hannah Arendt defines action as the highest form of human activity: distinct from work and labour, action includes collaborative expression, collective decision-making and, crucially, initiating change. Focusing on the chapter on action, Judith joins Adam to explain why they consider this approach to be so innovative and incisive. Together, they discuss Arendt’s continued relevance and shortcomings, the book’s many surprising and baffling turns, and the transformative power of forgiveness. This conversation was recorded in December 2023.

Chapters in focus:
Prologue
V. Action

Read more in the LRB:

Jenny Turner: We must think!
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n21/jenny-turner/we-must-think

Judith Butler: 'I merely belong to them'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n09/judith-butler/i-merely-belong-to-them

In ‘A House for Mr Biswas’, his 1961 comic masterpiece, V.S. Naipaul pays tribute to his father and the vanishing world of his Trinidadian youth. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz in their first of four episodes to discuss the novel, a pathbreaking work of postcolonial literature and a particularly powerful influence on Pankaj himself. They explore Naipaul’s fraught relationship to modernity, and the tensions between his attachment to individual freedom and his insistence on the constraints imposed by history.

Read more in the LRB:

D.A.N. Jones: The Enchantment of Vidia Naipaul
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n08/d.a.n.-jones/the-enchantment-of-vidia-naipaul

Frank Kermode: What Naipaul Knows
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n17/frank-kermode/what-naipaul-knows

Paul Theroux: Out of Sir Vidia’s Shadow
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/paul-theroux/diary

Sanjay Subramahnyam: Where does he come from?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n21/sanjay-subrahmanyam/where-does-he-come-from