The Institute for the Radical Imagination presents:
A talk by Miguel Vatter, Professor of Politics
A talk by Miguel Vatter, Professor of Politics
Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
Friday, December 5th, 7 p.m. – 9 p.m.
Location: LIU Brooklyn Campus
Health Sciences Building, Room 224, and by ZOOM
“Pulling the Emergency Break in the Anthropocene: Progress or Return?”
What does philosophy of history look like in the Anthropocene, from a “planetary” point of view? And why should philosophy of history concern us today? I will argue that climate change and the ecological catastrophe of our age radically call into question adherence to the belief in progress and set the stage for posing anew the alternative: progress or return? I develop this question from two perspectives: a theologico-political and a physico-political one. The former elucidates the Christian underpinnings of a notion of secular progress and its fundamental belief that nothing repeats itself in history. The latter perspective considers history and progress from the late 19th-century “recurrence” problems emerging from thermodynamics, the discovery of entropy, and the possibility of negative entropy, culminating in the idea of eternal recurrence in Blanqui and Nietzsche. Reflecting on the relation between energy, technology, and communism, Walter Benjamin wrote this: “Marx said that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But maybe they are something entirely different. Maybe revolutions are the way in which the human species, traveling on this train, grabs for the emergency brake” (GS I,3 1232). I want to suggest that the thought of eternal recurrence is our emergency break.
To register for the seminar, please follow this link:
