Denial as a Sociological Category

»In his Metaphysics Aristotle viewed knowledge as the result of the desire to know and even postulated that ›all men by nature desire to know.‹ The assumption that human beings desire to know has been at the corner-stone of modernity. Yet in the Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche put the point famously: ›I want, once and for all, not to know many things.‹ Mark Lilla, in his recently published book Ignorance and Bliss, echoes this Nietzschean proposition: ›We want to know, we want not to know.‹ The desire to evade knowledge – self-knowledge in particular – is as powerful as the desire to know, a claim which is true for individuals as well as for groups. While denial has been amply discussed by psychoanalysis, it has remained absent from sociology. This lecture discusses this notion from the standpoint of sociology, showing it is crucial to understand collective behavior.«

— Eva Illouz