Philosopher Renata Salecl

This week's show featured a lecture presented by the Institute for Human Sciences at Boston University titled "Tyranny Of Choice: How We Become Who We Are."

The lecturer was Slovenian philosopher and sociologist Renata Salecl, who will be introduced by the Executive Director of the Institute For Human Sciences, Irena Grudzinska-Gross.

Salecl discussed her book in progress, an analysis into why late capitalist insistence on choice increases feeligns of anxiety and guilt. "In the Western world," Salecl writes, "people are not only under the impression that there are endless possibilities to find fulfillment in life, but they are also encouraged to be some kind of self-creators, i.e., they are supposedly free to choose what they want to be. In this highly industrialized society, which allegedly gives priority to the individual's freedoms over submission to group causes, people, however, face an important anxiety-provoking dilemma: "Who Am I for Myself?"

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