Joseph Tanke is a contemporary philosopher who writes extensively on aesthetics and politics.  His recent work examines the changed nature of anxiety, together with its increasing centrality to contemporary life.  Tanke suggests that anxiety is the price that the self pays for being a self under the economic, political, and cultural conditions found today in Western Europe and the United States.  In this presentation, Tanke will seek the roots of anxiety within the development of the neoliberal economic and social agenda, specifically its destruction of labor unions and forms of social solidarity, its casualization of employment, and its dismantling of social welfare programs.  This vantage point is intended to provide for a conversation about the prospects of agency and resistance.  Together we will consider the role of the arts within the staging and promulgation of forms of resistance.      

Joseph Tanke is revered by many Bay Area artists for his years of teaching at California College of the Arts and for his crystal clear forms of theoretical discourse. He is currently chair of the Philosophy Department and director of the International Cultural Studies program at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa.