Society of Fellows scholar Aamer Ibraheem, together with Emily Hoffman and Professor Claudio Lomnitz, convenes a monthly reading group, “Will Without Ends,” that brings together faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students. The group, which launched in Fall 2025 and runs through Spring 2026, is co-sponsored by the Social Study of Disappearance Lab and the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.

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Will Without Ends

This reading group aims to explore the shape of political will in conditions stripped of futurity. It asks, what animates action when its efficacy is foreclosed, when agency is decoupled from consequence? This inquiry considers a paradoxical will, one that acts not toward outcomes, but in defiance of their foreclosure. This is a will untethered from teleology, unmoored from liberal fantasies of progress or change, yet not reducible to resignation. This, one might say, is a will without ends.

To explore such will one needs first to confront the discursive moment we live in, where “freedom has been cast as predicated upon a subject that does not exist, and upon a fictional ‘will’ that presumes such a subject” (Wendy Brown, 1995). Rather than seeking a fixed theoretical framework, this reading group proposes a conceptual site to rethink and perhaps displace familiar tropes of agency, fatalism, and responsibility. We will explore the notion of the “unheroic subject,” a figure who either finds themselves unable to act or who acts despite knowing their efforts may not lead to tangible change. This figure embodies, or more critically, confronts their inability to embody, a radical form of agency that moves beyond liberal paradigms of autonomy, ability, expressivity, and progress.

Meetings:

1. Wednesday, November 19^th 10:30 – 12:30
2. Wednesday, February 11^th 10:30 – 12:30
3. Wednesday, February 25^th 10:30 – 12:30
4. Wednesday, March 25^th 10:30 – 12:30
5. Wednesday, April 15^th 10:30 – 12:30
6. Wednesday, May 6^th 10:30 – 12:30

Reading List:

1. The Mystery of Courage (2000) by William Ian Miller
2. Who Comes After the Subject (1991) (Eds.) by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy
3. Ugly Feelings (2007) by Sianne Ngai
4. Responsibility and Judgment (2003) by Hannah Arendt
5. At the Mind’s Limits (2009 [1966]) by Jean Améry
6. Radical Hope (2008) by Jonathan Lear & “The Aesthetics of Survivance” (2008) by Gerald Vizenor