Giovanna Borradori (Chair and Professor of Philosophy, Vassar College) “The Politics of the Secret: Snowden, Wikileaks, and Derrida”

Giovanna Borradori (Chair and Professor of Philosophy, Vassar College), will give a lecture entitled “The Politics of the Secret: Snowden, Wikileaks, and Derrida”

Few on the left seem to doubt the progressive promise of today’s whistleblowers. But what is really progressive about it and is it a tenable promise? To answer these questions Giovanna Borradio asks us to critically reflect on what constitutes surveillance. Does the Orwellian imagery, conjured by the revelations of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, adequately grapple with the contemporary practices of dataveillance, souveillance, and coveillance? What if this recent war against surveillance was a form of oblique castigation of an unspeakable desire for self-exposure, driven by the need to be minutely examined and permanently followed by others? Borradori’s thesis is that there is a messianic claim implicit in the “logic of the leak:” truth can be revealed because it is a static object, immune to social and cultural apprehension. On the score of Jacques Derrida’s meditation on the right to the secret, Borradori explores a duty to spectrality, founded on the possibility that secrets can only generate more secrets, and thus cannot be indiscriminately exposed.

Giovanna Borradori holds advanced degrees from the University of Milan, Italy (“Dottore in Filosofia”) and the University of Paris, France (“Diplôme d’Etudes Approfondis”). She specializes in European philosophy of the 19th and 20th century. In recent years, her research has been focusing on the aesthetics of architecture and the philosophy of terrorism. She is the editor of Recoding Metaphysics: The New Italian Philosophy (Northwestern University Press, 1988) and the author of two books: The American Philosopher (University of Chicago Press 1993) and Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (University of Chicago Press, 2003), a “philosophy best-seller” translated in ten languages.