‘Shock and awe’ is typically a state of reduced capacity to act, move, or resist. Under very special conditions it can be experienced as vitalizing, but in the current conjuncture, it is most readily associated with military or terrorist strategies directed at foreign enemies or, more startingly, turned inward in the hands of disaster capitalism and aspiring autocrats. The effect of dumbfounding paralysis is even more potent with actions that appear themselves self-destructive: when subjects wilfully demolish what used to secure their prestige and power; when rising authoritarian regimes are supported in anticipatory obedience; or when climate change seems to be deliberately accelerated through arms and technology races. How can one not feel utterly disoriented, when it seems as if the world is so clearly oriented towards its own destruction?
To be sure, the stupefying paradox of self-destruction, which can be pushed toward an (onto)logical impossibility that collapses activity and passivity, subject and object, can be quickly dissolved by moving to smaller scales and stressing that those who destroy are not the same as those who are being destroyed, at least not in the short term. Yet, rather than restoring the apparent self-evidence of a rationality based on competitive self-assertion, it seems equally important to challenge it and show the manifold ways in which such rationality and its aggressivity can become self-destructive. Can one make productive the paradox of such a critique, which does not take an external position and instead proceeds from within, seeking to make the paradigm of self-assertion implode into more benign forms of autoreduction such as self-restraint and self-questioning? To what extent might stupefaction in the face of frenetic destruction also have to do with the possibility of recognizing in it a self-destructiveness that is turned outward and, in its denunciation, a conservative trope of patronizing normalization?
Monday, 16 November 2026
Cécile Wajsbrot
Further talks to be announced soon.
All talks start at 19:30 and will be in English.
