Courses and Lectures

Developing Kyle Whyte’s insight that “Talking about climate change is an exercise in telling time,” my focus will be on how the temporal framing of climate change is narrated. I will begin with an exploration of the predictions and reconstructions of climate science in order to pose a challenge to the received phenomenological accounts of time. This introduces Chakrabarty’s distinction between global and planetary “calendars” in conversation with the temporal, sublime, and phenomenological categories of world and earth. I then turn to the fantasies of managing time proposed under the rubric of sustainability and longtermism, especially as these drive contemporary capitalism (interlocutors including Nancy, Colebrook, Torres). I will conclude with an account of “crumpled” time inspired by Merleau-Ponty, Serres, and Barbaras.

Lecture 1: Telling Time: On Climate Calendars
Lecture 2: Buying Time: Sustainability, Longtermism, and Extinction Fantasies
Lecture 3: Crumpled Time: Flesh and Finitude

Individual lectures by
Ferdinando Menga (University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, Italy);
Marjoleine Oele, Radboud University, NL;
Omar Rivera, Texas A&M University, USA

Global warming is not only a preoccupying and even terrifying mutation of the world in which we live, it also brings about a mutation of the concept of world. The motivation of this week’s lectures is the following hypothesis: if the ethical and political challenges of global warming are not met with adequately today, this is largely because the inherited ethical and political theories rely on an obsolete concept of world. To mitigate or overcome this problem, the lectures do not simply apply phenomenological and deconstructive conceptions of world to the fact of global warming, but on the contrary, they show how the event of global warming deconstructs and transforms the inherited phenomenological and deconstructive concepts of world themselves.

Lecture 1: The loss of homeworld and the phenomenology of inhuman nature
This lecture shows how global warming can be analysed as the event that disrupts the classical phenomenological concept of world (as homeworld) and calls for an asubjective phenomenology of nonhuman nature, instead. As Ted Toadvine has already presented the temporal dimensions of this during the week 1 of the course, I will present its spatial dimensions by introducing an idea of a planetary displace and show how these presuppose an idea of elemental being.

Lecture 2: Dis/articulations of the global world
While the first lecture examined global warming as a planetary process, this lecture examines it as an effect of globalisation. Deconstruction provides us with a useful analysis of the world in terms of globalisation. Deconstruction starts from the experience of destruction and the end of the world discovered in classical phenomenology, but it does not stay with it. Instead of remaining in the destructive closure of the Ge-stell, it discovers what Nancy calls a more originary “struction” behind it. Its aim is not to flee the unworlded world but to open the world towards new modes of worldmaking. With Derrida we will see how his regulative idea of “cosmopolitanism of whatever living beings” could be used to speak about the world of global warming; with Nancy we will develop his idea of the “creation of the world” towards a world fit for us as “terrestrials”.

Lecture 3: Techno-natural transcendence
How to combine the elemental being of nonhuman nature and the fiction of cosmopolitanism or worldmaking of living beings of any or every kind? In this last part of this lecture series, I will present an idea of natural technicity / technicity of nature that provides not an ontological basis but a (quasi-)transcendental condition of thinking their connection. I will show how to think this in terms of “technics of naturing” and “bio-technics”.

Individual lectures by
Eduardo Mendieta, Penn State University, USA;
Adriel Trott, Wabash College, USA;
Thomas Nail, University of Denver, USA

Many political and environmental philosophers have contended that climate change has upended our understanding of the political: it has created a world where our common-sense political concepts and categories no longer apply. The task facing us today is therefore, first, to recognize the glaring inadequacies of our current liberal conception of the political for solving the environmental catastrophe, and, then, to completely rethink the old political ideas from the ground up. The course invites the participants to contribute to such an exercise in eco-critique and political imagination.

Our starting point will be three important critiques of liberalism that, in different ways, question its relationship to nature: ecofeminist critique, eco-Marxist critique, and a Foucauldian critique of biopolitics. According to these accounts, the problem is not just the ineffectiveness of liberal market-oriented policies in solving environmental problems; the more fundamental problem concerns the ontological ordering of reality that liberalism institutes. In the liberal conception, the political domain demarcates a separate, distinctly human realm of freedom, where all people are assumed to be equal in terms of formal rights. Other realms, such as the feminized private realm and the non-human environment are neatly cordoned off, devalued, and managed through depoliticized techniques.

We will also grapple with the thorny political questions that must necessarily follow from such ontological critiques, and lead us to the realm of political imagination: How are ontology and politics related to each other? Does metaphysics somehow determine politics or vice versa? How can environmentally destructive, exclusionary metaphysical concepts, categories, and divisions be deliberately transformed by political means?

Lecture 1: Ecofeminism: Metaphysical Dualisms and Devalued Natures
Lecture 2: The Metaphysical Foundations of Capitalism
Lecture 3: From the Realm of Freedom to Biopolitics and Beyond

Individual lectures by
Michael Reder, Munich School of Philosophy, Germany;
TBA;
TBA