What if we began to think of reason as plural, reasons or reasonings, rather than the monolithic Reason from on high? What would it be like to think with all five senses, going beyond our habitual ocularcentrism? What if affect were both disruptor and the source of our greatest inflexibility? What role does ritual have in metabolizing the whole spectrum of human affect, both individually and collectively? What relationship holds between beauty and ethics in times such as these? What can art, philosophy, and activism learn from one another? How can we create alliances across sociological divides that keep theorists and activists separate? Finally, how can we create more plausible scenarios of hope for a greater number of people?
This conversation was possibly the most wide-ranging I’ve had so far on the podcast. As you’ll hear, Dr Kilian Jörg is a capacious and audacious thinker, and has reflected long and hard on some of modernity’s most recalcitrant and most insidious problems: problems ranging from the climate crisis to the loss of ritual, from polarization to ‘the hope gap.’ But they don’t just do the hard thinking; they are also engaging with these problems from the ground up, reaching across sociological divides that may seem unbridgeable to many. A kaleidoscopic thinker, Kilian is as fluent in the realm of philosophy — drawing from Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, and Michel Serres — as they are in the world of art and ecological justice, inspired by the likes of Timothy Morton and Elin Kelsey. All in all, this conversation was a masterclass in what it means to refuse the dualisms between thinking and acting, between theory and activism, and to invoke the possibility of pluralism in the face of pure criticality.
