This seminar explores stupidity as a literary and philosophical problem, alongside related concepts including ignorance, idiocy, folly, non-knowledge, and other forms of epistemic failure.

From Flaubert's bêtise, through Musil's account of the dangerous proximity of intelligence and stupidity, to Deleuze's attempt to make stupidity "the object of a properly transcendental question"—"How is stupidity possible?"—writers and philosophers have repeatedly suggested that stupidity is more than the simple absence of knowledge. Rather than treating stupidity, ignorance, idiocy, or forms of non-knowledge chiefly as satirical targets or empirical deficiencies, this seminar approaches them as formal, ethical, political, and philosophical problems. These questions recur across diverse literary and philosophical traditions, from nineteenth-century realism and modernism to contemporary debates about coloniality, expertise, artificial intelligence, agnotology, and the politics of knowledge.

What becomes possible when stupidity, ignorance, and non-knowledge are understood not merely as deficiencies to be overcome but as conditions internal to thought, judgment, and representation? Can literature disclose forms of ignorance that philosophy, politics, or criticism tend to misrecognise? Conversely, how might philosophical accounts of non-knowledge reshape our understanding of literary form?

Possible topics include:

• stupidity, idiocy, folly, and ignorance in literature, film, or visual culture;
• literary traditions of bêtise, cliché, bourgeois opinion, common sense, unreason, folly, stupidity, and non-knowledge, from Flaubert and Dostoevsky to Kafka, Musil, Woolf, Beckett, Bataille, and Coetzee;
• philosophical and theoretical accounts of stupidity, doxa, idiocy, non-knowing, ignorance, and epistemic failure in Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Bataille, Barthes, Deleuze, Badiou, Rancière, Cavell, Cora Diamond, Avital Ronell, Robert N. Proctor, Nancy Tuana, Londa Schiebinger, and others;
• stupidity in relation to politics, bureaucracy, expertise, pedagogy, artificial intelligence, anti-intellectualism, misinformation, and public reason;
• comparative and global approaches to stupidity, ignorance, and non-knowledge;
• race, gender, disability, coloniality, and epistemologies of ignorance;
• comedy, animality, ethical attention, and the limits of critique.

We welcome papers on any period, language, region, or literary tradition, and particularly encourage comparative, interdisciplinary, and theoretically ambitious work. The seminar is intended to foster sustained conversation across literary, philosophical, and critical traditions.