Contemporary counterconduct

Abstract

In this lecture delivered at Stanford University in February 2019, I explore—in a writing style that I call, following Adorno, “late style”—a conduct that counters pressures to behave in ways shaped by the prevailing governmental mechanisms of a certain milieu. The subject is malice, the setting the academy, and some proximate events in my home department and in my scholarly experience. Critical of the current turn to morality in the discipline, this intervention argues instead for a focus on Haltung, or on a particular stance in the pursuit of knowledge, which is attentive to well-defined sets of human relationships.