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WiSe 23/24: Capital, Ecology, Critique (Englisch)

Jan Slaby

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Anthropogenic global warming has begun to cause massive disruptions to ecosystems and human societies, and its effects will get progressively worse in the mid- and long term. Other aspects of the ecological crisis include biodiversity loss, soil depletion, ocean acidification, fresh water scarcity and disruptions to established patterns of human life across the globe, with vast socio-political consequences such as abject poverty, severe health impacts, mass displacement and armed conflict. This research-based MA course aims at an in-depth exploration of the ecological crisis in view of its historical development, its economical and societal root causes in global capitalism, its political dynamics and in view of contemporary efforts to tackle it on the terrain of political and societal mobilization. Philosophy will make contact with political economy, geography, sociology, cultural anthropology, political theory, science and technology studies, environmental humanities, global history, post- and decolonial theory, and related fields. While many of the texts we will read are not from philosophy, the way we approach them will be philosophical: we want to understand what goes on in the global present and disclose the ecological crisis with concepts that connect the facts of ecosystem degradation with normative orientations of individuals and collectives affected by it. Among the questions we ask are the following: What is to be done in the face of the ecological crisis and its systemic causes? How to live with what we know without succumbing to despair and inaction? How to organize resistance against both the limitless expansion of an extractive status quo and a technological solutionism? How to theorize both the causes of the crisis and the task of organizing enlightened resistance to it in a way that is politically potent, inclusive and potentially majoritarian? We also want to historicize and decenter prevailing western intellectual perspectives on eco-social relations. The course is set to be continued in the summer term of 2024; the class in the winter term is devoted mainly to studying and discussing current literature in order to endow participants with a foundation in ongoing debates, while the summer term (2024) will be devoted to a more practical agenda, singling out key themes for in-depth research in student working groups. close