In the study of European imperial formations and the forms of governance on which those formations relied, questions of epistemology occupy a capacious and curiously confined analytic space. On the one hand is the shared assumption that the mastery of reason, rationality and inflated claims made for Enlightenment principles have been at the political foundation of colonial regimes and should be at the center of critical histories of them. On the other hand, the lived epistemic space in which empire's architects and agents operated has often been occluded by the assumption that their epistemic commitments were clear and shared. In this paper, I draw on research on the 19th Century Netherlands Indies to explore what they imagined they could know, what epistemic habits they developed to know it, and what happened when what some thought they knew they did not.

Ann Laura Stoler has served as the Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research in New York since 2004. She has worked for some thirty years, comparatively and most extensively in the Netherlands Indies, on questions of colonial governance, racial epistemologies, and the sexual politics of empire. Her books include: Race and the Education of Desire (Duke 1995), Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (California 2002), Along the Archival Grain (Princeton 2008), and the edited volumes,Tensions of Empire, with Frederick Cooper (California, 1997), Haunted by Empire (Duke 2006), and Imperial Formations, with Carole McGranahan and Peter Perdue (SAR 2007).

This is the opening workshop of the Exporting Enlightenment Seminar, a 2008-2009 workshop series at NYU. It is directed by Harry Harootunian and Arvind Rajagopal. It is sponsored by the New York Humanities Initiative and the Institute for Public Knowledge.

This event is free and open to the public with RSVP and photo ID. Reception to follow.

To understand how to live in a world where the name of democracy has become a means of enslavement is to understand the dynamics of the dialectic of Enlightenment. It is also to confront the ambiguity of a tragic politics of life: of producing (and alas, denying) one's own limits in the absence of any historical or transcendental guarantee. It is arguable that Enlightenment thought is the outcome of the democratic imaginary, not its cause, while paradoxically the outcome of Enlightenment history may be democracy self-destruction. The argument will revisit some of Antigone's modern children, from the Rights of Paine to the Rogues of Derrida.

Stathis Gourgouris is Professor at the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He is the author of Dream Nation (1996) and Does Literature Think? (2003) and editor of the forthcoming Freud and Fundamentalism. His current work, a critique of political theology, is titled Nothing Sacred.

This event is free and open to the public with RSVP and photo ID. Reception to follow.