It is as if the Earth is gradually turning into Trisolaris, a strange planet from The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin’s sci-fi masterpiece. Trisolaris has three suns which rise and set at strange and unpredictable intervals: sometimes too far away and horribly cold, sometimes far too close and destructively hot, and sometimes not seen for long periods of time. Devastating hurricanes, droughts, and floods, not to mention global warming – do they all not indicate the appearance of something for which the only appropriate term is ‘the end of nature’? (‘Nature’ is understood here in the traditional sense: a regular rhythm of seasons, the reliable background of human history, something on which one can count always to be there.

Slavoj Žižek is senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, a Hegelian philosopher, a Lacanian psychoanalytic theorist, a Marxist social analyst, and the most tireless lecturer as well as author of countless books like Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012), Heaven in Disorder (2021).

Chair: Christian Schmidt