The 2025 Holberg Lecture, feat. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: ‘Imperatives to Re-imagine the Future’

Lecture by the 2025 Holberg Laureate, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. An imperative is an urgent command, generally brought about by external circumstances. Today, natural violence creates an imperative to develop a planetary view of the future. ABSTRACT All our plans encounter the limit of the future anterior – the past in the future – a certainty that something “will already have happened” related to the plans we are launching. Today that “past,” in whatever future we can imagine, calls forth geological history, so that some of us think: “system change,” rather than “climate change,” is required. This lecture discusses how the humanities can elaborate that change. ABOUT THE LEUREATE Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the 2025 Holberg Laureate. She has held the position of University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University since 2007, where she has been a faculty member since 1991, and where she is also a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Spivak has published nine books and translated many others. Her works have been translated into over 20 languages. Spivak’s key works include In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), and Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee and Certain Scenes of Teaching (2018). Her latest book is Spivak Moving (2024). This event is part of the 2025 Holberg Week, which takes place from 3rd to 6th June, in Bergen and Oslo. Please see the Holberg Prize website for more information: https://bit.ly/3EjubiW Photo: Alice Attie.