A Philosophy of Humanism Symposium Event
Speaker: Jo Ann Balint
Title of Presentation: Searching for Recognition: A Politics of Jewish Identity
Presentation Summary: Using the concept of “the politics of recognition,” this presentation utilizes the starkly divergent perspectives in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew and Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism on the political possibilities of a minority group. Sartre concentrates on the existential moment in which a subject creates an object through an ahistorical, antagonistic encounter. Freud’s emphasis is on the unconscious, the source of both the self-misrecognition and the recognition of the Jew as manifest in a powerful, evolving tradition. The views of Society for Humanistic Judaism founder Sherwin Wine and author of Judaism Beyond God, afford an interpretive bridge between them.
Biography: Jo Ann Balint is a political theorist who holds degrees in philosophy, law, and political science. She is an alumna of the Second Class of the Humanist Institute. She has presented most recently at the EPH symposia in New Orleans and in Cambridge. She is currently researching the intersection of religion and secularism in American political culture.