Climate as Debt

The notion of reduction is central to the discourse on climate disaster and environmental collapse. A political understanding of climate has led to urgent calls for ever increasing measures aiming at reduction—for example reducing emissions or consumption. Such calls are based on the premise that there can be quantitative remedies to the current environmental disaster. However well-intentioned, earnest, and necessary such approaches are, this symposium would like to pose the provocative question whether the current will for quantitatively defined action against climate breakdown might actually be a symptom of—rather than a solution to—the problem at hand. The attempt to restore nature to a desirable or optimal state seems to be a desire to sublimate, dismiss, or silence the aporias that environmental disaster imposes intellectually, politically, and existentially.

In order to think through the blindspots of the dominant discourse on climate breakdown, the symposium addresses a range of topics including the local dimensions of the climate question, the psychoanalysis of apocalypse, visual representations of ecological disasters, the paradoxes posed by the reliance on scientific authority, the philosophy of climate, and notions of climate debt and climate futures. The symposium features a workshop entitled ‘Legal Imagination for Gaia’ that attempts to develop lateral alternatives to the legal personification of nature. The workshop seeks to create or repurpose legal concepts such as species, trans-subjective rights, diffuse interests, ecocide, and intergenerational justice.