>> we will continue to bring

you new programs and publishing news and watch the archived programs any time at the tv.org. >> spending more than five years in south africa he was elected to the african national congress. during the transformation after apartheid mmr of exile of red, white, and black the stricture of us antagonism. the rating has been honored with the legacy award for nonfiction and an ea

promotion. in his new book memoir and philosophy through and from one another and with the worldview with examples from his own life which in turn forms philosophy. all yours. >> this is the third time i've done something like this. it seems to every time. thank you for coming out tonight and sharing your evening with me in the auditorium of the free library of philadelphia.

now we are together like this so now in this type of situation there would have been an auditorium. i don't know. i hope everyone is safe and healthy. i will share with you an episode for my book. those of you who have seen the book or read from the other book know that there are two trains running. one is critical theory that will explain the structure of black suffering as something that cannot be reconciled such as oppressed women who are not black and the working class and postcolonial. but i want to reiterate and music of black people.

and that constituent elements. there are a lot of questions like high school or college debaters and graduate students and then with that cycle psychoanalysis and as professors and then that what is at stake with respect to the intervention. i would take up all the times that i have to share a story with you as well as to ask questions i can't go into that i hope that you would to note

the people who are included in this. and those that are embedded as opposed to a critical theory because they have been embedded what you will find in the back of the book not with numbers but various parts of the body itself so if you are reading along and see the phrase the economy inside of a story that acts as a speedbump he don't know what that is so then you turn back and find that in bold that is a definition from my friend and

colleague. so i want to say before i began the schematic overview of what the stakes are. >> this is from slavery and to my mind this is a book that is momentous to captivity and slavery as karl marx and that political economy 1869 and was slavery and social death he

says the problem in the slaveholding society that it was necessary to introduce a person to the status of slaves and then goes on. for the workers to be hired elsewhere. with that problematic shift and instill in the same position. but then you could become employed later on but they were no longer a slave it was necessary continually to repeat the original violent act of free man into slave. did you get that? is important to repeat the original violent acts of

transforming into slaves that was the that i found to be at that moment so one of the problems is the fact the structure and performance of violence cannot be reconciled with the structure of which the anti-immigrant violence there is a way in which there something different going on the act of violence constitutes the prehistory of all stratified society so to understand what that means 300 years ago we did not have a

dynamic of capitalism so in order to produce that you need an ocean of violence to transform into proletariat and that is called the prehistory. so then says but it is determining the prehistory and the con current history of slavery. so that is a golden moment of terror and trauma because what it says is that inside the structure of capitalism once people have inculcated their role and with that gratuitous

nature to continue on not to rule them through hegemony we only went to violence that created capitalism to rear its head with strikes but he says that with slavery the prehistory that constitutes the paradigm is also the con current history of the experience. that is epic because that means in the nonsensical violence that cannot be reconciled with the working class because the violence of the slave does not transform itself into hegemony when the slave acquiesces.

so that is what is at stake to me and the project but let me shift now to the other mode of expression with a different kind of story and this resonates with what i just said even though i only read about six pages and it's not clear but if you read the chapter starting on page 55, then you understand what i'm saying. let me begin. so a few pages beginning on page 55 and if you have asked where i will start that is where i am starting. but at a certain point in time

i will jump to the middle c will be able to follow me after a certain point so what you need to know if you have not read the book is that i am thankful to produce this beautifully constructed book the book came on sale april 7th and we're in the first printing of the book so all the folks at ww norton did for me in the book really heavy paper literally. so you will have a book that is very special in terms of its value, the second printing is valuable as well that wouldn't have the heavy paper.

he was that the year 1976 through 1980. i am between the ages of 20 and 24 so it jumps around the bed. in that particular time. in minneapolis minnesota for the most part. this is a story i have never told the for. not to my brother or my sister not even the women i have partnered with and married. thirty years came and went so i always thought i said in

need to be elsewhere which is a natural response to a confession when i thought i could die. i believe when it was time and then to face the man from the new jersey turnpike. and the man that was shot in the chest if it ever became high enough that required my sacrifice i waited count that secret reservoir of courage from the age of 12 and then my junior high and high school teacher from the descendents

of the political trial of the chicago eight that happened to be one of those bubbles we were together ten years although we were never married i was 22 when we met. i thought it started when i met stella at the march in 19681 week after dartmouth college that me home for being in a campaign of solidarity with the people who created that outside of town. the people from the appalachian trail that some fraternity brothers called hillbilly angry. . . . . this wd

they had to take action. a third pointed out those that came back from new hampshire skirting the mountains through the confederate flag. we drove past a and every fourth or fifth car was startled by the

luck of hatred as we drove by. we are waiting and in the end though society devoted to the civil disobedience campaign and to rescind its decree. during the campaign, i was arrested and jailed and he waited for me at the courthouse and handed me a two-page single page sheet. your trouble just ended and i had just begun.

>> two years prior just before i turned 20, the fbi tracked me to trinidad and like most by the time they are declassified it is riddled with reductions. the name of the agent in the winter of 1976 the winter my sophomore year of college had been redacted. nor did he or she seem interested. at the university of the west indies she studied caribbean theater and he did field research on a major family of law or spirits on the west african religion.

his third course was an independent study he designed himself a thesis paper he wrote on his experience as a participant researcher of the communist party in trinidad. the fbi funneled none of this and the report went like this. he was in contact with the committee and promised he would attempt to make contact to obtain literature for it and to test the national aid. he claimed to be a member of a revolutionary group in the united states born april 11, 1956 in the united states as a student at dartmouth college, passport number 231-6717 and the

mailing address 3983 dartmouth college hanover new hampshire 43755. this report was sent from caracas. the legal attaché. according to the puppet and the fbi works with the agencies and host countries. the role of the legal attaches is one of coordination as they do not conduct of foreign intelligence gathering investigation. once they have given why, they

are running in trinidad to spy on an american student. the nature might be. the report began. it was mentioned in the memorandum the reductionist nearly two lines long. it continued requested to be informed has come to the attention in the political extremist activities in the united states. then they are requested to advise the connection of the security activity. >> this however is not the story

that he'd never been able to tell. that story i'm going to tell you now that this was complicated it corrupts the links that helped me make sense of what they were subjected to four years after the return from trinidad in 1980. two years after dartmouth college in 1978 kicked me out for reading a civil disobedience campaign on behalf of workers who were unrepentant. the fbi filed in the middle of the chapter and corrupted the causal logic of the events that make my hands quiver as i scratch these words might. before it arrived, i thought at last i can chart the chain of events the offense left us no

alternative but to send her to live with relatives for her own safety. the fbi came when i was finally steadfast in my conviction that what happened was it was her past, hers alone. in my studio apartment there were two men who wanted nothing of value, collateral heat for the lawsuit against the government. i was not yet driving a cab at that point. that would start when i moved in with stella. i did work as a waiter at williams cathay in minneapolis but the restaurant was slow one night and i was sent home early.

my studio wa is on the ground fr of an old brownstone six blocks from lake of the aisle. the key worked before to my studio was changed from the inside. how could i have done that, i thought. it took a moment for me to realize i could not have done. somebody else did that. i sprinted down the hall. the only light there was a silhouette. one leg curled up the window, then the other. he stumbled and almost fell before he ran his long hair moved up and down in the light and like a fool i chased them

halfway down the aisle he and like an even bigger fool i called the cops. when the police arrived there was little space left. you have a wad of cash on you or you left it here when you went to work, but when i do think that to me, pointing to the money and the dish drainer, money that i carelessly left by the sink until i could go to the bank. i told them i had left it there. the cop by the sink was counting. 80, 85, 90, $95 in cash. the camera worth what, $300 worth of stuff just left here and you see someone -- two

people i said. he said two people chained to the door from the inside and then played bridge and had a cup of coffee? you see how it looks from where we stand. i have a right to privacy. that is what they stole. they looked at me as though i said i have the right to shingles. the note i was writing was spent on the desk. whoever did this, i said, knew my schedule. they thought they had the time. time for what? you won't know unless you investigate. the cop by the sink nodded. investigate, gotcha. then he picked up two books from before and said how a murder

went unpunished. karl marx. he placed both books back neatly on the floor. not surprisingly i soon moved in with stella and had a gun in the closet that he didn't know how to use. thank you. >> thank you so much for the reading. before moving to some of the audience questions, i want to circle and allow you to put some things together began by asking you what you talk about the false arc of the redemptive narrative and how that applies to your? >> was i ready to begin with was a small passage and one of the

things i think this notion that he's bringing up gratuitous violence is a violence that has no coherent reason for it. in other words you can't say it is triggered by so-called bad behavior by indian native americans were, it isn't triggered by the need to discipline people to produce occupied land or surplus value and capitalism. so, if you live in a paradigm of contingent of violence then you can actually tell stories of

redemption. i need redemption in a rather abstract way. i mean moving from plenitude or equilibrium which would be between 1492, before contact. then moving to the art of conflict which would be the occupation by europeans and genocide. adam then moving to the equilibrium restored plenitude restored or reimagined which would be if you look at the nativnative americans and for ee and working class, look at the stories of say the revolutionaries, the story doesn't have to end in the regaining of liberation but what it can do is end in a conceptual

coherence of what it might look like. and the reason that can happen and this is one of the profound interventions of what has happened and there are many other people i can name, the interesting thing about this is that if there was no moment of plenitude in other words if the word black and the word africa noted the cartography are implicated in this structure of the african continent, in other words if there are people before that but they are not black, this structural condition is very much like the workers.

there's no such thing as a worker 500 years ago. worker comes into being with capitalism. so, if you have a situation in which this word black is elaborated by this gratuitous violence, that's number one. then what you don't have and not if you don't have a prior moment of living plenitude before slavery. does that make sense so far? >> host: so far. >> guest: so then coming back to what patterson said about violence as necessary to create a paradigm you can't have this society if we are coming together and agreeing that there will be some people on top and some on the bottom. we need a structure to make that

happen. but if they also say the artificial positions are the case -- if that is the case, and that a paradigm where there is no prior moment for this position, and the antagonist, not the worker, not a man, not the colonial, but humanity itself in other words your argument is that humanity needs to distinguish itself from what it is not then you are in something that disrupts the ark because you can't imagine what was before. and if you're in antagonist, it's not a certain kind of

economic system. it's not a certain kind of colonialism. antagonist is a human race itself. then what you have is a situation in which it is constructed and can be dealt with but you cannot write a sentence as to how to deal with it because it is limited and equilibrium is always embedded in the other narratives so what thewe have done is to blow the d off the concept by suggesting it is not any more universal than the words human, that it requires a being walking around

who can never be regained and we think the it is in the collective unconscious especially where people who say i don't see race. [laughter] on the character or the quality of the character what that means is they are not whining consciously but they are not tapped into their unconscious but they called primary [inaudible] it is the conscious mind saying there's something more essential. it is a phobic response that doesn't have a conceptual

grounding. the unlike my anxiety for native americans or debating i can't say why i have that anxiety. what i said before i started writing is that it is symptomatic living in the structure of violence that cannot be reconciled because it goes on with its gratuitous nature even after people have encountered. but you cannot hear why did the cop shoot me if it is necessary

to. >> host: okay now apply that to the end of your book which seemed to have a redemptive quality to me, or did i misread? >> guest: i used to tell graduates [inaudible] if you find a redemption, please tell me so i can excise it. [laughter] >> host: it's important to excise. >> guest: it has to do with a relationship with my mother and how the general reader could think that wait a minute now the

first two books especially the middle path he's saying you cannot employ the narrative because slaves are implemented of other people's needs even in the psyche of the imagination. this is what i think they argued very well in my second book. then you have this book that ends and now having turned 64 about 20 days ago i can live with that because it isn't true but to see how it isn't true you

have to read the critical theorist in conversation. i get it but now it is this marxist theory and we have the critique from the left. but the point of fact what he has done with his dialogue is there is a social life in spite of social graph and what the end of the does it doesn't actually

say here's what i'm doing. there are a lot of people who are not going to get it for what it says is at the end of the day there is a political disagreement in an intramural way so you've got liberals in the country and radical communists and it looks like there is a rapprochement with because it i does something to e day-to-day experience of a the others plantation it does something to the intramural

experience that we would argue it is not for the liberation from the paradigm of this with the end of the book does is recognize this but there are important political differences that can never be reconciled. we are not going to fight about this for much more. they both suffer the same hydraulics even though the attitudes toward their country cannot be reconciled and i think that this is a good point people don't always get what they can get better. the great communist of hegemony can write this in prison notebooks and understand in the

first 20 years of the century they are mortal enemies at the level of experience but in the pit of the debate a paradigm of fascists repressed by capitalists and the implement and the workers are pressed by capitalism and have ties to real against it. that's important because it would be great to understand we need to be a part to destroy. the point of the matter is structurally if it never happened, those entities are the

same so the end of the book doesn't make the argument because i'm trying to really speak to the people about how we are with each other and what i have to do through that is the apparatus of the critical theory if the person is curious, they will get it this is an episode of the social life, this is people on the plantation which we argued 21st century america is the saying that they are going to be kinder to each other. >> host:

>> host: do you think other scholars misunderstand or oversimplify the pessimism and if so, how? >> guest: there's an article many people read it called the unclear word. one of the things he does in the article at the very beginning is to show the actual response to the ensemble of claim it isn't

an analytical response it's an emotional response and one way to characterize that is a these responses are redundant and show they don't understand the vernacular. i didn't really understand the critical theory either that requires burning and anyone can do it. for the young 18 to 19, 20-year-old with holes in their shoes going to get green after college and then coming back to the workshop in this highly sophisticated or co- and you

have to know the word social formation that collapsed they think that people are not human and instead of saying that's an interestinthat aninteresting cle that out, what they see as a critique and condemnation of human capacity to be human because of the specific just like the capacity to have a certain value and the parasitic on this earth and working class. so it's an argument that showed what is the capacity and what are the elements of humanness in other words it doesn't have to be organic and then where does

that power comes from. so people respond emotionally to the words and number two, a lot of people on the opposite that thewe are all part of the univel human family and if you've written three books like that come it is the anxiety of antagonism and this is the last point i will make before i close on the question because the anxiety is antagonism is something that was interesting to me as i traveled the world, i've had to deal with the anxiety of antagonism in teaching young people in the united states in a way that i haven't got to do and germany or south africa and that is the anxiety of being presented with a problem for which there is no imaginable solution even though there is a solution it cannot be theorized that this moment so the anxiety of entitlement some

producers responses which are redundant and emotional rather than analytic and that has to do a lot with the work of matthew arnold wrote in 1969 he changed the british public school system and one of the things he said we can't be teaching people in the public schools problems without solutions because if they do that the working class will put themselves in the street. when we presented problem in the classroom we pray. with a solution and this has been the british and american psychic reality this need to have these questions for every problem there is and you certainly won't become a great revolutionary. >> host: it reminds me of the

part in the book where after being in proximity to the massacre in south africa, you come up with an exercise for the class and to prevent becoming an exercise about violence and everybody wanted nothing to do with it, they don't want to think about it and other privileged did anything to the perpetration of the violence. >> guest: yes. thank you for saying that. precisely. this book ended up being 113,000 words. i think i turned it in at 150,000 [inaudible] got me to agree that the vignette yovignettes they were g about when teaching creative writing they were all white except for one and he was so

happy to have this exercise and i had to truncate -- i wrote the whole thing out in my journal i had to truncate it because when he saw the rage in the white student's response to me, he just tucked his shoulders and anaunt because he was south african and he knew what could happen with the rage combine a black american. i don't give a damn, but -- [laughter] he was just like where is this going to go. anyway, the next question. >> host: somebody actually posted a link in the question and answers to an article for the listeners and viewers.

there was a question i'm having trouble finding it now about how to take the language of the afro pessimism. how do we translate this practice going off of what we were just talking about? >> i think that would be a dangerous move because when i go places and do lectures and readings in mainstream auditoriums i always ask the organizers to find the a group of people involved in the movement for black lives whether your city has a plaque by

spatters shoulder so i ended up doing a three hour workshop on this pessimism because when the book came out, and even for the past ten years a lot of people don't know if ther is there wasa subterranean river of people around the world an in all these different cities who are reading afro pessimism and debating and discussing it on social media and file people in the academy so like a group of people i'm entering the states where these comments are involved in the political ventures in other words they are not making the call for the end of the world by the end of the human capacity is

parasitic. we need better housing and that's great because especially now we are seeing the structural violence, the way that people are often like flies and busy structural dynamic. i don't go in and say we've got these reformists because they invited me to a workshop so what we're sayinwe are saying to do o celebrate their efforts for a more or less civil rights agenda because that has opened up a space that has invited me and others in to talk more concretely even though it isn't

about the structure is more about can we get accountability. but why then do they keep coming into these closer workshops is because it isn't the discovery. it is a big listening ear if they didn't have to make sense of the world so this space of reformists organizing has been a place that has opened up for the theoretical understanding of suffering and if were not for that i wouldn't be here for the movement of black lives. it's trying to widen its perspective. what we are doing today even

though some of you might be revolutionary, you can't go to the communities and say you can't mobilize people overnight like that, but the beauty of it is the space they have has been open to thinking about the structure as opposed to the immediacy and so these two things worked together but you can't simply bring it in and say here it is. we are not there yet. >> host: here is a question that mentions the saslow. how was your own experience would you explain the fact south africa hasn't been able to avoid the pitfalls that explained half

a century before the resolution of that struggle? >> guest: could you do something for me? can you say what you think that question is asking because i could talk about south africa all day long. help me out here? >> host: how has your own experience in south africa would you say that they have fallen into the trap essentially that they could possibly get through? >> guest: >> host: an ideal resolution of the struggle. >> guest: i would say to this

person two things. first half of the book really deals with the question and i'm just being honest with you is heavily loaded and marketed and when i have intellectual time, i'm writing a novel for my next book. i don't remember everything [inaudible] that's what i will say is there was a moment in 1992 when we had an opportunity. there were committees and we were studying this heading the chief of staff wanted a person to write a book for south africa so that we could avoid what came

out in the national consciousness and he says what you are going to get is a middle-class but has a connection to europe and you will find yourself more impoverished and then all the problems that have been able to talk about it as if it is your problem. there was a moment in which there was a group of us over here writing documents about how we are going to d-link the entire region and economy from global capitalism by producing a broad system between south africa, mozambique, zimbabwe, botswana, those that suffered

1.5 million deaths. we are going to create a system where the resources we had so we wouldn't be exporting raw material. we would completely cut ourselves off from in this period you have the moderates that were not down with that and said if we do this they are going to zap on us the way they do on cuba. it would be very interesting for the american military to send a battalion of soldiers and sailors many of whom were black to come get a black liberation

movement. we know what happened in vietnam where more officers tied with a bullet in the back. so we were -- in that period to make a long story short the moderates that had been in exile in the west were in deep conflict with those that were in cuba and the soviet bloc and north korea and palestine and the radicals who stayed in the country they were having a deep ideological conflict. in this period the soviet union crumbled, and what that meant was of moderate faction had more power and global connection then the radical because $400 million from the non-communist west

flowed into the anc over the past years and $400 million in weapons and logistical support and training from the soviet bloc so we were kind of even like loggerheads because the people on the ground were down for a total revolution where we take back the land, take back the banking, the money and we gave the middle finger to the left. when the soviet union fell, that ended the support of the radicals and so one of the key moves in the negotiation that can he very shortly took us off of the negotiating committee that was negotiating in the state.

then he put them on the social cultural committee. we have a mandate to tell the bank it had been secured by the apartheid state to take back the corporate funds and redistribute the land and once the soviet union fell once they were commandeered, that was it. we were right back in the

chapter from the national consciousness. we were all part of the same party. then it turned into this show that we have now. >> what are the emerging questions that excite you?

>> im really energized by the way it has scandalized the very foundation of the humanities. i am trying to do this without a thing into this peak but it understands after may of 1968, something major happened which it came into its own and antonio

[inaudible] of the humanities research is that everyone is positioned in such a same way. you are born and go 18 months [inaudible] then you are inculcated or brought into a linguistic system and then you become positioned through discourse as a subject but that's positioning is happening prior to speech. an ultrasound is done and shows

a penis, there's nothing there that shows that the discourse is mapped onto that kind of flash in a gendered way in other words the room is painted blue. names like andy and frank are tossed about as opposed to josephine and bernadette is a father is draping of football or soccer and a mother is wondering what kind of husband he might make. so discourse, language. it begins to create this being prior to its birth and it enters into that. whether you are marks or freud, everyone is in agreement.

one of the things it has done is said it isn't positioned by discourse. that is a really scandalous and interesting thing. i have to read the psychoanalysis but that is the big argument not positioned by discourse in the essential way that positioned into the techniques that being irreconcilable if all the others, rich and poor, brown, yellow, red, white incompatible so what it does is come back to scandalized the foundation of the humanistic research from literature, philosophy by saying there is nothing as a universal subject because the subject is a parasite so we have done

rigorous work to show this. what we are finding is that this hurts people and the response as as opposed to theoretical. people see about ten to 15 bucks a. not just in this country but of life in brazil it is absolutely

fascinating for the structural dynamic soaker that i am excited about the way that this is offending >> host: i would be out of a job because my investigations i

take the psychoanalysis and i look at it and say here is why it is inadequate so i'm arguing that there is a kind of phobia that cannot be therapeutically dispensed with. and it can only do that in a society that hides its hatred. i would have been out of a job when andrew jackson was president. a true american president who speaks the true consciousness of

america. there would be no reason for me to do rhetorical analysis speaking the american dream. >> host: it's been terrific talking with you. the book is wonderful and i highly recommend it to people. this is where i say thank you and goodnight and encourage people to follow us and visit us online to access or digital ourl archives and updated events scheduled. thank you again, frank. everyone, keep reading and have a good night. >> guest: thank you.

during a virtual program, richard, former director of the consumer financial protection bureau, reflected on the creation of the bureau. here's a portion of his talk. >> one of the important things for people to realize is the finance dramatically is changed in the last two generations. really since world war ii. there was very little credit available to our grandparents and there wasn't a big part of their lives, they didn't get into the huge financial trouble but in today's society fast forwarded two generations, credit card spending is ubiquitous. auto loans are a big part of people's lives in part of the country where people drive to work. mortgages are the way in which

we buy houses and they are a significant obligation and student loans are a part of life for many. so people have a lot more opportunity and face a lot more risk so this is a bigger piece of our lives. this brings us to the financial crisis which was caused by widespread irresponsible predatory mortgage lending that caused many families to lose their homes and the ended of the entire economy. that led to prevent a crisis like that from happening again and it created a an idea that had been put forward by them professor now senator elizabeth warren for a consumer agency to protect consumers in the financial marketplace.

it was basically impossible to sell somebody a toaster without bursting into flames and burning down their house but it was legal to send them a mortgage that had a chance of putting them into foreclosure and putting them out on the street with their families. providing protection for products was a huge oversight and regulatory system in washington was focused on the big banks and financial companies themselves. it was about keeping them safe and sound and making sure that they prospered over time. it's important to remember that if you think goes belly up it isn't going to be good for any of the customers. but at the same time it was important for everyone to turn

around 180 degrees and look at the customers in these institutions and realize if they were mistreated in the marketplace, something was wrong and we need to redress the balance and the marketplace so consumers have the protection and support they need in order to flush. ... >> joe thank you for being wis