Good evening, everybody. Can you all hear me okay?

What an honor to follow up after the most beautiful poetic words of a former student. Thank you, Alora, for setting the bar so high. I have to say that I am extremely moved and honored that you have made the space for me to be here with you today, and to celebrate this truly momentous occasion in your life.

It's a bit of an irony for me to be here, as some of you know. But let's just say that this might be the career highlight of my short time at Swarthmore College.

When I look back on the spring of 2025 — five, 10, 20 years from now — as fascism seeps into our institutions, the discourse of safety and vulnerability morphs into a pretext for silence and censure, and the moral fabric of the world becomes more threadbare by the day, I'm glad that, because of you, I will be able to reflect on this moment with enormous pride. After witnessing your collective struggles and those of your peers to bring into being a world you believe is possible, this crazy, lucid dream of Swarthmore College. In the face of institutional hostility and political repression the likes of which have not been seen since the 1970s, which was well before I was born, I know with certainty that you carry an immense light within you. And no, I didn't think I would be invoking a Quaker metaphor in my speech, but when in Swarthmore, do as the Swatties do.

I want to stress that yours is a light that is needed more than ever because we are entering some dark times. It is the weight of this darkness that makes this invitation not only an immense honor, but instills in me a sense of immense responsibility. The context in which we are gathered to celebrate you is grave. It is one marked by our occupation of Lenapehoking and the ongoing displacement of, and resistance by, the indigenous peoples who were driven from it by European and American colonizers. In an institution that has chosen to make an example out of those who fiercely give voice to injustice by barring several of you from walking in your graduation this weekend. In a country that for the last 594 days has aided and abetted a genocide that has exposed the colonial racism at the heart of the global order. In a world hiding the excesses of capitalist, heterosexist, and ecological violence behind the false promises of a technocratic, AI-generated utopia.

I say all of this not to inspire in you a sense of nihilism, but to insist that, in a world historical moment like this, the task of philosophy is one that befalls us all. In 1784, German philosopher Immanuel Kant penned a short but powerful essay, “What Is Enlightenment?” in which he warns: ”It is so comfortable to be immature."

So I'm not one out here saying that philosophers are particularly gifted with words. We're not poets, I know this. But what a line, right? It is so comfortable to be immature. What Kant's referring to when he invokes the language of immaturity here is what he calls the "lack of resolve and courage needed to make use of one's intellect without the direction of another." In other words, to think for oneself.

In moments of great transformation, the impulse to immaturity — to divest oneself of the responsibility to interrogate, critique, and understand, to fall helpless in the face of struggle — it is in these moments that this impulse to immaturity is the greatest. It is felt when we are told to fall in line for our own good because things would be easier that way, to accept that ICE is going to do what ICE is going to do, or to trust so-called experts when they tell us that the most violent conflicts of the world are beyond our comprehension, that it's simply too complicated to talk about. It is so comfortable in moments like this to be immature.

Now, Kant is making a pretty damning assertion here. He's saying that our inability to think for ourselves does not stem from a lack of capacity to reason, but from a lack of integrity and conviction. Immaturity is not an unfortunate state of affairs. It is a choice that we make. It's a seductive one, certainly, but it's a choice nonetheless. What we must do instead is “dare to know,” sapere aude, as Kant puts it.

But what is it that we are being asked to know in a moment like this? In an essay of the same name, “What Is Enlightenment?” penned 200 years later, Michel Foucault — and if I thought I wasn't going to make a Quaker metaphor, you can bet I tried really hard not to talk about Foucault in the speech, but here we are. Michel Foucault observed that Kant's text presents the duty to reason for oneself as a kind of philosophical ethos with a very specific kind of critique at its heart. This critique is not defined by the search for universal truths, or first principles, or transcendental structures of reality, as has perhaps historically been the purview of philosophy.

This kind of critique is instead tasked with understanding who we are now. Maturity, after all, is a moment of development, a transition from a state of ignorance to one of knowing, of knowing what has shaped us, the historical forces and social conditions that have produced our present selves and modes of living. It is, in Foucault's words, "a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, and saying."

By getting us clear on who we are, the work of critique helps to illuminate the possibility, as Foucault says: "Of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are do or think." The critique is a critique in the service of a freedom — not as an abstract promise of non-interference but as a poetic freedom, the freedom to test the limits of the taken for granted so that we can build other ways of being in relation with one another and with ourselves. In this way, daring to know is less about arriving at definitive answers and more about committing to an ongoing process of self-reflection, critique, and renewal, continuous becoming that resists stagnation and embraces freedom. This task of experimenting, testing, and cultivating other ways of becoming is precisely what fascism seeks to neutralize and, in turn, it is precisely what must be defended.

If there is one kernel of wisdom I wish to impart to you tonight, it is that fascism is less a structure of government, less a specific set of policies, institutions, or practices, than it is a foreclosing of freedom. It is defined by a profound anti-sociality. It demands our alienation from our natural and built worlds. It prioritizes individual triumph and material gain over relations of reciprocity and free association with a mythic story, a set of discursive practices, or a culture industry ready to package this inhuman way of living into something desirable or necessary.

A few years before his 1984 response to Kant, Foucault writes in a brief preface for Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: "The major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism." And not only the historical fascism — the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively — but also the fascism in us — in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

Foucault rightly identifies fascism here, not merely as a political system, but as an ethos, of orientation, a way of inhabiting the world much like the philosophical attitude itself. And understood in this way, the struggle against fascism is a lifelong one. Resisting it requires a constant vigilance, a "tracking down of all the varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround us and crush us, to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives."

Let me tell you, this is not an easy task. It is grueling. It is exhausting. I have fallen back it into unhealthy patterns. I have burned out. I have pushed away comrades one day, only to fall apart in front of them the next. I have taken lorazepam in the morning, taught in the afternoon, gone into the city to protest in the evening, and cried myself to sleep at night wondering if any of this will make a difference anyway. The world is bleak. We cycle from one apocalypse to the next, and it is easy to fall into despair.

I have fallen into despair more times than I can count. But what I've come to learn over the last year or two, often because of the example that you all have set, is that despair is simply another form of immaturity. Despair is not the same as grief or mourning. These are processes that affirm our capacity to care and remind us that we still hold the ability to love. We have to mourn, we have to grieve, because the worlds that we inhabit is one that is full of grief.

But despair isn't the same. Despair is the relinquishing of agency, resignation in the face of difficulty, and a loss of hope that allows the bitterness to fester and make us easy targets for fascism. To quote from Toni Morrison's 1995 Charter Day celebration address at Howard University: “Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third." To fall into despair is to make the work of fascism all the easier. For it is an environment of despair that fascism calls home, one marked by, in Morrison's words, "fear, denial, and an atmosphere in which its victims have lost the will to fight."

So what do we do if not despair? I think, because I'm insufferable and I can't stop talking about Foucault, that we have to cultivate precisely what Foucault calls an “art of living” counter to all forms of fascism. One that recognizes that resisting fascism is more than merely fighting. It is, at its core, about living. The philosophical ethos that we must cultivate in this moment is one that enables us to see that the fight for dignity is not one that can be waged alone, and that envisioning a world of reciprocal flourishing calls us to live out practices of affirmation, care, and even grief now.

Community without solidarity is a fragile lie that we cannot afford to tell. This is why the FBI deemed the Black Panthers’ anti-fascist praxis so threatening, not because they took up arms in self-defense, but because they implemented a free breakfast program for children, set up grassroots mutual aid projects, community health centers, and free schools. In other words, the Panthers had to be neutralized because they were fashioning a world for Black Americans and for all Americans outside of the violent impositions of a ruling class tethered to the imperatives of racial capital. It was because the Black Panthers dared to fight for a life in which they could live, not as atomized individuals pursuing the private interests, but as embodied beings bound by mutual responsibility, shared humanity, and erotics of care.

This is the art of living that is most threatening to fascism — the same art of living that students and young people all over the world have put into practice and encampments, in public displays of refusal, and in an unwillingness to accept a world whose existence is predicated on the mass degradation of life. And if we, as your professors, have done our job right — and I do think at least some of us have — then it is an art of living that you will carry forward as you move beyond these hallowed halls.

As I bring this to a close, I want you to think back to your First Collection four years ago. I wasn't even at Swarthmore at the time, so you'll have to fill in the imaginative blanks. I want you to remember the hopes, the dreams, and the idealism that you carried with you as you embarked on this journey. I ask you now to dwell in that space of possibility and perhaps renewed hope — not as naive optimism, but as a deliberate, courageous act of resistance against the forces that seek to extinguish it.

The world you are stepping into is fraught with injustice, with forces of uncertainty and those that challenge us. But it is also a world that needs the kind of fierce intellect, compassion, and integrity that brought you here four years ago, and that which you have cultivated since your arrival. Your light is exactly what will push back against the coming darkness.

This moment in this collective of minds and hearts is not an endpoint, but a call — a call to live with the philosophical ethos of critique, care, and the courageous will to think together in the face of impossible odds. In doing so, you honor not only your own journeys, but the struggles of those who came before you and the generations who will follow. From the depths of my heart, thank you for letting me be part of this moment with you.

May your light never dim.