Public Lecture by Sara Ahmed

In his preface to the 2020 book Common Sense: Conservative Thinking for a Post-Liberal Age, Michael Nazir-Ali refers to how the analytical philosopher G. E. Moore defended common sense by pointing to “his own hand,” to show he was “more certain that his hand existed” than he was of “any sceptical attempts to show that such was not the case.” Nazir-Ali then makes use of Moore’s hand to talk about the coherence and stability of relationships and institutions. Many contributions to this conservative reclaiming of common sense articulate common sense as the loss of a shared reality as well as legacy, of an old raced and sexed order. In this lecture, I will return to the testimonies I collected from academics and students who have made complaints about abuses of power within universities shared in my recent book Complaint! I will explore how some become complainers by virtue of not reproducing a legacy or how some complaints are framed as the failure to hold onto that legacy. Complaint provides a lens with which to think about appeals to common sense, how common sense becomes all the more appealing, the more some seem to be losing their hand.

About the presenter

Sara Ahmed is a British-Australian writer and scholar whose area of study includes the intersection of feminist theory, lesbian feminism, queer theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism. She is the author of 10 monographs: Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge, 1998); Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (Routledge, 2000); The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke 2006) The Promise of Happiness (Duke 2010); On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, (Duke 2012) Willful Subjects (Duke 2014) Living a Feminist Life (Duke, 2017) What's the Use? On the Uses of Use (Duke, 2019), Complaint! (Duke, 2021).