On April 16, 2026, Professor Anthony Farley presents his keynote lecture "From Failing Hands We Throw."
This is a ghost story. But “…that's getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead” (Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man). In the beginning was the unspeakable.
The modern era began with genocide in the Americas, colonialism in India, and “the conversion of Africa into a commercial hunting ground for the gathering of black skins” (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1). Bodies were marked to have and to have not. White was marked to have. Black was marked to have-not. Laws were spun to tether people to capital as owners, as owners of instruments of continuous dispossession.
Languages, philosophies, and eschatologies were destroyed, dropped out of the universe like collapsed stars, and turned into capital, the rule previously-accumulated labor over labor, the rule of white-over-black, the sovereignty of death over life. We cannot say what happened when the world ended, the words were lost, the meanings were lost, lost to the violence, lost to the singularity. The mass of those murders was beyond the beyond, beyond all meaning, beyond enlightenment’s possibility.
Born of world-spanning violence that was and remains too much to bear, we are unable to articulate what we are, how we should live this death, what the world is, or how to break faith with the unspeakable. This is a ghost story.
Anthony Farley is the Matthews Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at Albany Law School. A reception will follow.
The lecture will be preceded by a poetry reading by Furqan Mohamed.
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Anthony Paul Farley is the James Campbell Matthews Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at Albany Law School. His work exists at the intersection of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the critique of political economy. A recent work, “Blackness, Repetition, and Non-Philosophy,” appeared in Oxford Literary Review 46.1 (2024): 31-48. Farley was the Gretchen Hoadley Burke ’81 Endowed Chair at Colgate University in 2023-2024 and the Peter Rodino Distinguished Visiting Professor at Rutgers Law School in 2020. Farley, a member of the American Law Institute and the governing board of the Society of American Law Teachers, is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Virginia.
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Register Online
Room 280N, York Lanes, is located on the second floor and is accessible by elevator. For accessibility accommodations or support, contact us by email.A reception will follow the lecture; kindly advise us of any dietary restrictions or accommodations.