Hello. This week we're introducing the three new series starting on the LRB's Close Readings podcast next year.

Yesterday you heard from Colin Burrow and Claire Bucknell about their series on satire.

Today, Adam Schatz introduces his series, Human Conditions, looking at some of the revolutionary thought of the 20th century.

Hi, I'm Adam Shats, and for my close reading series called Human Conditions, I'll be joined by,

in turn, Judith Butler, Kankaj Mishra, and Brain Hayes Edwards.

We'll be looking at some of the most revolutionary ideas of the past hundred years or so,

which will give us an insight not only into the

inner life of the 20th century, but which are continuing to shape the world that we live

in now. My guest for the first four episodes will be the acclaimed philosopher Judith Butler,

and the text that Judith has chosen for this series are Jean-Paul Sauch's Antisemite and Jew,

Simon de Beauvoir's, The Second Sex, Franz Fanon's, Black-Skin, White Masks, and Hannah Arendt's the

human condition. And I asked Judith about those choices. So anti-Semite and Jew gives us a way of thinking about what it means when the terms that name who we are are given to us by others who seek to demean us or eliminate us.

Very often we think about the social categories in which we name ourselves or explain ourselves as ones that we would like to be able to devise.

But in fact, they come to us with all kinds of histories.

So how is it that a Jew comes to affirm being a Jew when the only way the Jew has been referred to is in an

anti-Semitic way? Or how is it a woman comes to define herself when to be a woman seems to be

set in a subordinate position? That was someone to Beauvoir's question. Fanon talked about

waiting in the theater for the picture of the black

man to come, and he would be addressed by this picture. He would be defined by it suddenly and felt

himself becoming trapped or objectified by that what's called aninterpretation, that mode of address that is also

deeply defining. What kinds of freedom do we have to remake ourselves or to struggle with

historical categories that communicate difficult, if not demeaning or paralyzing legacies?

...