Perry Zurn, "Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry" (U of Minnesota Press, 2021)
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What is the central thesis of Curiosity and Power and why is curiosity political?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tyson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver, and I'm co-host of the channel, along with Kerry Figdor, Robert Talese, and Alexis McLeod. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Perry Zurn, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at American University. His book, Curiosity and Power, The Politics of Inquiry, is just out from the University of Minnesota Press. Is curiosity political? Does it have a philosophical lineage? In Curiosity and Power, The Politics of Inquiry,
Perry Zurn shows consequentially, yes. He further asks, who can be curious? How? When? To what effect? What happens when we are curious together? Engaged with multiple social movements ranging from the mid-20th century to our current time and thinkers of curiosity from the ancient world until now, Zurn theorizes the normative and political force of curiosity while providing insights into how it has and can be wielded for transformative collective resistance. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy.
I'm delighted to be here.
Well, will you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your background as a theorist and how you came to work on a book about curiosity?
Sure. Yeah, I'm a political philosopher by training, and I focus on studying forces and histories of change. And for me, that means I ask how change happens in in our minds and in our bodies and between people and institutions. And I focus in particular on political resistance and curiosity and transgender life as separate loci of transformation. But sometimes these topics bleed into one another. And as you'll see in the book, Curiosity and Power, all three are certainly present, despite the fact that the title simply names curiosity. So that's a little bit about me and a little bit about what I do. But how I got to this particular book, I feel like you can tell a story from a really personal angle, or you can tell it more professionally.
And so I'll start with the personal. I grew up in a context that was particularly conservative in all kinds of ways, religious and political and otherwise. And although there were certainly avenues for free-ranging curiosity in my education, I was homeschooled, but in other senses, my curiosity was incredibly constrained and there were appropriate ways to practice it. inappropriate topics to practice it on, and then there were clearly inappropriate ones. There was a lot of policing of knowledge in my youth. And nevertheless, I was entirely enthralled by knowledge itself or by the process of inquiry. I've just always loved school. And I find myself, I count myself lucky that I'm now a professor and I get to just be in school all the time.
But so I wasn't, I wasn't, I wanted to continue on and go to college. And at the time, because of my sex assigned at birth, my parents said no and just get ready to get married. But I ended up finding my way a little bit late to college. And when I got there, I thought, oh, you know, I've made it. I've found some freedom and now I'm going to be able to kind of practice my curiosity on anything and in any direction. But what was fascinating is there, again, I found these constraints on my curiosity and ways in which there are certain topics that are covered in higher education and certain ones that aren't, certain lineages that are tracked really, really carefully and others that are entirely jumped over.
And so there was something about that, this curiosity. this feeling that where I thought curiosity would be most free, it still wasn't. And that the reasons for that seem to be social and political and in some cases, religious commitments. I just thought, wow, there's something here to think curiosity more deeply. And so from there, I think Honestly, I think I developed what some people call a breadcrumb curiosity, which is I just started kind of noticing where the word shows up in my life, in my work, in philosophy in general, as I went through grad school.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central thesis of Curiosity and Power and why is curiosity political?
0:01–6:43
2
How did Perry Zurn’s personal upbringing shape his interest in curiosity and power?
6:43–14:26
3
Why does Zurn argue that who can be curious, when, and how are all socially and politically conditioned?
14:26–21:35
4
What historical cases (Sarah Bartman, Zora Neale Hurston) illustrate the politics of curiosity?
21:35–29:43
5
How do Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida model different, sometimes conflicting, forms of curiosity?
29:43–36:47
6
In what ways does Eli Clare’s work critique ‘purient’ curiosity and offer a disability‑centered alternative?
36:47–43:29
7
How does trans experience reshape the practice of curiosity and resist being treated as a ‘curiosity’?
43:29–51:30
8
What future directions does Zurn propose for curiosity—opacity, ambiguity, and intimacy—as companions to inquiry?
51:30–57:00
Speakers
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