Seminarios Filosofia Navarra 2024-2025

Seminarios Instituto Cultura y Sociedad

“Social Identities and Social Justice: Rethinking Ethics and Politics in Times of Crisis,”
3 seminars on Identity Politics and Justice, Instituto Cultura y Sociedad,
University of Navarra:

1) From Revolution to Religion: The Woke Revolution’s Founding of Social and Political Power on a Religion of Victimhood, January 21, 2025

William Franke, Revolution to Religion, University of Navarra (pt. 1)
William Franke, Revolution to Religion (pt. 2)
William Franke, Revolution to Religion, University of Navarra (pt. 3)

2) Identity versus Universality: The Universality of What is Not, January 23, 2025
William Franke, Identity versus Universality, Navarra (pt 1) – YouTube
William Franke, Identity versus Universality: The Universality of What is Not (pt 2 Q&A)

3) Transcending Power Politics Negatively: Kenosis as the Apophatic Solution to Societal Conflict, January 24, 2025
Transcending Power Politics Negatively: Kenosis as the Apophatic Solution to Societal Conflict pt. 1 – YouTube
Transcending Power Politics Negatively Kenosis as Apophatic Solution to Societal Conflict (pt 2 Q&A)

From the Preface of William Franke, Social Identities and Social Justice: Reconceiving Ethics and Politics in the Wake of Wokeism (Washington: Academica Press, 2025, forthcoming):

My ongoing engagements with this topic include, most recently, a series of seminars organized by Professor Montserrat Herrero at the Institute for Culture and Society (Instituto Cultura y Sociedad) of the University of Navarra in Spain. My seminars on social justice and wokeism began on January 21, 2025, the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as 47th US president and his inaugural speech signaling a 180-degree turnabout in American politics. I had been treating wokeism as an inexorably advancing revolution, but all of a sudden, as I began these lectures and as this manuscript was about to go to press, we entered into a counter-revolutionary phase. We are now going to see things from a completely different perspective. In crucial respects, wokeism will be on the defensive rather than the all-conquering force it had become in the years leading up to this precipitous turning point. This type of reversal is typical of revolutions and counterrevolutions.

The woke ideology had reigned supreme, since, say, 2009, when Barack Obama became president, but most intensively during the Biden-Harris administration (2020-2024), over the last two years of which my reflections have been elaborated. Their sense and purport vary as the context into which they are read shifts. However, their analyses remain intact whichever side has the upper hand. They position themselves on neither side of the embittered debates around wokeist politics. They address, instead, the polarization of politics into mutually deaf factions. This tragic incomprehension is likely to worsen, not to end or attenuate, under the diametrical about-turn of politics from Biden to Trump. My message becomes thereby only the more urgent.