Lecture: Srećko Horvat – Love in the Age of Selfie

With a response by Frank Furedi

12 November 2015 – 14.30 -16.15 – Raadzaal UFO – Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 33, 9000 Gent – collaboration with the UGent Policy Unit Gender & Diversity.

In 2013 Oxford Dicitionary announced selfie as “the international Word of the Year”. Since then, it seems we are witnessing a selfie-pandemic. According to the Russian Ministry of the Interior at least 10 Russians have been killed and 100 more injured while taking selfies this year alone. Social networks and new technologies, from Facebook to Instagram, only enforce these trends that are correlated with narcissism and self-commodification. If Christopher Lasch warned about the normalization of pathological narcissism in late 20th century, what we should do today is not only to investigate various new modes of narcissism, but pose the really crucial question:  what about love in the “Culture of Narcissism”? How did love or falling in love change due to new technological developments from the late 70s, when Lasch’s book was originally published up until today? And above all questions: is there falling in love without narcissism? That are some of the questions that the lecture will try to raise.

Srećko Horvat  (1983) is a philosopher born in Croatia. He is author of “What Does Europe Want?” (Columbia University Press, 2014) co-authored with Slavoj Žižek, “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism: Radical Politics After Yugoslavia” (Verso, 2014) with Igor Štiks, and most recently “The Radicality of Love” (Polity Press, 2015). He regularly publishes for The Guardian, Al Jazeera and New York Times.This is a boxed text block. You can use it to draw attention to important content. Frank Furedi is Emeritus professor of Sociology, University of Kent and Visiting Professor, Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London. He has published widely about controversies relating to issues such as health, parenting children, food and new technology. His books include Authority, A Sociological History (2013), Invitation To Terror; Expanding the Empire of the Unknown(2007), The Culture of Fear (2003) and Paranoid Parenting (2001).

Please, register for this lecture at the UGent Policy Unit Gender & Diversity