Amia Srinivasan: belief

Transcript context

…Right, which has a brutal element to it. How humor fits into utopia is a long-standing puzzle because humor is often brutal, right? Yes. Look, I don’t think the utopia or the post-revolutionary world is a place without any form of brutality, and it’s certainly not a place without humor. It’s going to have disappointment and heartache and tragedy and tragicomedy. Human foibles will still exist. Heartbreak will exist. With all of those things, you have humor. What is very limited is the thought — and I’m not suggesting that you’re advocating for this thought — but the thought that you basically need structures of organized political oppression like racism to have humor. The Greeks had humor without having racism. They had other systems of domination, but they had a great and advanced sense of humor, often directed at intellectuals and philosophers, who, I think, are often very much a worthy target. I think there can be this view on which ending forms of domination and oppression somehow drains life of all that is special and textured about it: humor, love, intimacy, friendship. I just don’t think that’s true. I think, in fact, what the end of domination would do is release us more fully into the specific things that make human life worth living, including humor. Now, there’s an interview with you where you describe your own work and book — and I quote — as “discomfort, ambivalence, and truth-telling.” I thought that was a good take, but my thought is this: If you’re always carving out space for context and ambivalence, is there some path along which you end up in a social conservatism, admittedly a feminist social conservatism? Let me ask, what parameter values would have to be different for you to end up as mostly a social conservative? You don’t have to think the values are that way, but what does that counterfactual look like?…

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