Virtues of Unknowing: The Chickadee
Colloquium
Speaker: William Barnes, University of New Mexico
Start: May 01, 2026 - 03:30pm
Where: DSH 127
Description:
This talk develops the virtue of the chickadee as a practical ethical response to self-unintelligibility, synthesizing Judith Butler's psychoanalytic ethics of grief with Jonathan Lear's reading of Chief Plenty Coups (Alaxchiiahush), the last principal chief of the Crow Nation. Appealing to Butler's account of how unprocessed loss hardens into identitarian violence, the talk asks what skillful mourning looks like in practice — and finds its answer in Plenty Coups. Forced to witness the destruction of his way of life, Plenty Coups responded neither with blind retributive violence nor broken submission, but by consciously grieving his lost ego-ideal and realigning it around the Crow figure of the chickadee: the patient, adaptive listener who survives every storm by remaining open to what exceeds its understanding. The talk argues that this transformation models a cultivated willingness to remain opaque to oneself and one's conception of the good — not as self-dissolution, but as the ethical precondition for interdependence and collective flourishing.