Why we love ignorance | Renata Salecl

Renata Salecl guides us through the murky depths of ignorance.

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Knowledge is power and we want to know everything. Or at least, that's what dominant cultural narratives would have us believe. Yet from medical diagnoses to childhood trauma, we often choose ignorance for ourselves and are happier and healthier for it. Then again, many of the choices about what we know and don't know are made for us, by forces that are invisible to us. The relationship between power, health, ignorance and fantasy is anything but straightforward.

What do we really want to know about ourselves and is there such a thing as too much self-knowledge? What are the social and political forces that go in to shaping the forms of knowledge that are available to us? How do changes in culture affect our understanding of subjecthood? And when is it a good idea to shove one's head under the sand and deny reality?

Sociologist, philosopher and legal theorist, Renata Salecl, guides us through the murky depths of ignorance, and our underacknowledged passion for it.

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Renata Salecl is a philosopher, psychoanalyst and sociologist. She is a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana and holds a professorship at Birkbeck College. She is closely associated with the critical legal studies movement, and was awarded the title Slovenian Woman Scientist of the Year by the Slovenian Ministry of Science in 2010. Her books, on anxiety, postmodernism and sex, have been translated into 15 languages.

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