MERRY WASTING / FROHES VERSCHWENDEN --> Toxic Temple, AIL, February 2020

Dear Fellow Critters!

For thousands of years, at the end of every orbit, we are celebrating the divine center : the sun. After a relatively short aberration to the patriarchal God, now dead, we return to the archetype: the great radiator. Every year we worship her, the greatest spender at the centre of the system. Only by her uncontrolled excess of energy we can exist ! In her wasteful power we graze ourselves - and on this special day we venerate her by imitation: fir trees torn out in masses and adornded by flames, Amazonian deliveries hunt us globally, we indulge ourselves in short-lived plastic pleasures to heap them up to the future layer of the Anthropocene ! Quickly the paper is torn open, our mouths grimace in short-lived joy - we build mountains of garbage to honour her, so that she approaches us again. The technosphere crackles loudly every December 24th, in singing devotion we leave our toxic traces to the after-us - spending our most long-lived material in honour of the greatest waster of the system, our source of life !

In February of the year 2020 we will build this new old cult a temporary temple in the AIL. In the Toxic Temple we consecrate ourselves to the poisonous abundance and expect your noble gifts - this Christmas do not hand over your secretions to the ordinary garbage can, but administer them to our priesthood ! We collect everything that will outlive us – for the sun as a monument ! Contact us, and our clergy will joyfully receive your gifts !

More information on ailab.at and contact us at toxictemple@ailab.at

Bright night, holy night,

Your devoted sun-worshippers

Liebe Erdgenoss_Innen! 

Seit Jahrtausenden feiern wir am Ende der Erdumkreisung das divine Zentrum, die Sonne. Nur relativ kurz war die Verirrung zum patriarchalen Gott und nach dessen Tod kehren wir zurück zum Urbild : der großen Strahlenden. Alle Jahre wieder verehren wir die große Verschwenderin im Mittelpunkt des Systems. Nur durch ihr unkontrolliertes Übermaß an Energieaustoß können wir existieren ! In ihrer verschwenderischen Kraft weiden wir uns – und an diesem besonderen Tag tun wir ihr es gleich : Tannenbäume umflammt und ausgerissen, amazonische Sendungen erreichen uns global, wir überreichen uns kurzlebige Plastikfreuden und häufen sie zur Zukunftsschicht des Anthropozäns ! Schnell das Papier aufgerissen, die Münder zu kurzlebiger Freude verzehrt – Müllberge bauen wir nur ihr zu ehren, auf dass sie sich uns wieder nähere. Laut knistert die Technosphäre jeden 24ten Dezember, in singender Andacht hinterlassen wir unsere toxischen Spuren dem Nach-uns – verausgaben unser langlebigstes Material zu Ehren der allergrößten Verschwenderin und Quelle des Lebens ! 


Im Februar des Jahres 2020 werden wir diesem neuen alten Kult einen temporären Tempel im AIL einrichten. Im Toxic Temple weihen wir uns dem giftigen Überfluss und erwarten Eure noblen Gaben – überantwortet diese Weihnachten Eure Absonderungen nicht der ordinären Mülltonne, sondern übergibt sie unserer Priesterschaft ! Wir sammeln alles, was uns überdauert – der Sonne als Denkmal ! Kontaktiert uns, und unser Klerus wird Eure Gaben freudig entgegen nehmen !

Mehr Informationen auf ailab.at und kontaktiert und gerne unter toxictemple@ailab.at

Helle Nacht, heilige Nacht,

Eure ergebenen Sonnenanbeter_Innen

"Die Club-Tür unter ethischen Aspekten - Kein guter Club für alle?" - Radio-Interview at Deutschlandfunk Kultur

Yesterday, Jorinde Schulz and me have been invited to the old RIAS-Funkhaus to record an interview about the ethics of selection at club doors, about utopias and dystopias of raving, neoliberal containment and the potential of re-mixing the social stratum in clubs.

It will be aired today shortly after 16:00 at Detuschlandfunk Kultur under the title:

Die Club-Tür unter ethischen Aspekten
Kein guter Club für alle?
Gespräch mit Jorinde Schulz und Kilian Jörg

...and you will be able to listen to it afterwards on their homepage. 

"Affirmation of Ecological Reason(s)" - Presentation at the SFB Affective Societies of FU Berlin

Next Monday I will present my ongoing research "Affirmation of Ecological Reason(s) - how to be reasonable in a universe gone queer" at the Colloquium of Jan Slaby of the SFB Affective Societies of Free University Berlin. After a general introduction to my work and its framings I will focus on Descartes and Spinoza as two variations of one modern, epistemic regime. By doing so I want to question the all-too-easy (as it seems to me) identification of Descartes as the bad and Spinoza as the good guy for ecological reasoning and thereby evoke a deeper understanding of the ecological mess we are in.

The lecture will start at 17:15 next Monday (16.12) at the "Seminarraum" of the Institute for Philosophy, Habelschwerdter Allee 30, 14195 Berlin.

  

"Warum wir im Jahr 2020 noch viel mehr Gretas brauchen werden" at Berliner Gazette

I have published a commentary on - and positive reading of - the so called "Greta Thunberg effect" in the Berliner Gazette. Of course Greta Thunberg is today - aside from a formidable activist - a mediatized product. But why should we regard that as purely negative? Let's not forget how dark our times seemed only a couple of years ago and how much hope and momentum we can gather today - change is possible!


https://berlinergazette.de/warum-wir-im-jahr-2020-noch-viel-mehr-gretas-brauchen-werden/

Toxicity - Philosophy Unbound #26 happening this January in Chandigarh, India

Already one day after our wonderful Brussels-event, we are posting the next Call for Philosophy Unbound - this time on the other side of the world: in Chandigarh, India. For the second time it will happen on this magnificent sub-continent and this time we will focus on a topic that is especially virulent in the region: Toxicity.

Toxicity is also a topic which will occupy me personally in the next months, culminating in the processual exhibition "Toxic Temple" taking place in collaboration with Anna Lerchbaumer at AIL in Vienna in February (more information on that very soon). I will already give a performative lecture at Chitkara University about the conceptual thoughts behind the exhibition and will build some tentative installations made of garbage I found in field explorations in the lands of Pubjab.

The Call for PU#26 already gives you an idea of where we want to be going with the topic "Toxicity":

We live in toxic times. By using the concept of «Anthropocene», we try to make sense of our ecologically catastrophic condition of global warming, mass extinction, rising sea level, CO2 and acidification levels. Toxic pollutants such as sulfurdioxides, plastics and aerosols are marking more and more of our landscapes, which will take millennia to recover.

Toxicity has come to stay. The question at hand is if we, as humans, as mammals, as earthly critters, and who of us – since we are all differently vulnerable to these changes by virtue of our global positioning and socioeconomic status – will be able to stay as well, living under these increasingly toxic conditions.

To a certain degree, we will have to learn to live with Toxicity as a planetary condition for the next millennia. Of course we will have to reduce our toxic emissions as much as possible, but: Our soil is already depleted, our earth is already filled with millions of barrels of nuclear waste, our rivers are already spoiled, our landscapes are full of plasticides and our air has thickened.

The catastrophic times we live in call for the invention of lifestyles that cultivate Toxicity in new ways, in order to overcome it on the long run. This includes a re-thinking and decomposition of toxic gender roles and norms, pernicious global chains of production and exploitation, and poisonous politics of hate and segregation. 

How to live within toxic lands and discourses? How to create a saner place within madness? How to minimize toxicity without becoming poisoned? How to decompose the status quo in order to create more sustainable relations of living and dying on this planet?



Find more information on the Call here.

"The Spectacle of Critique" by Tom Boland - Review in IPA Journal

In course of my research for my project "Affirmation of Ecological Reason(s)" I have made a very interesting book-discovery which I reviewed for the International Political Anthropology Journal. Tom Boland's book "The Spectacle of Critique" (Routledge 2018) manages to do a "genealogy of critique" in a Foucauldian inpetus and thus performs a very important task to get beyond debates of "post-critique" or the like. In times of Post-Truth and the Anthropocene, this is a very important step for renewed political thought. In the words of the summary of the IPA Journal:

"Kilian Jörg reads Boland’s work to an exercise in the lines of Bruno Latour’s anthropology of the moderns. Boland digs deep into the past by linking critique back to its cultural background within world religions. Engaging with modern predicaments, the book uncovers the presumed neutrality and claims that critical thinking may be considered as an imperialist practice which spreads its tentacles towards all corners and niches of a democratic society. Its omnipresence has led to an uncontrolled proliferation of critique – as if it was the defining feature of a modern – and thus to ever greater fragmentation in an already fragmented public sphere."

The review article is now available for free on the IPAs homepage. If this should work somehow, feel free to contact me and I'll be happy to share it.

"Affirmation of Ecological Reason(s)" - Presentation at ULB Bruxelles

I'll give a little insight in my ongoing research project "Affirmation of Ecological Reason(s)" next Wednesday (27.11) from 16-18h at ULB Brussels, 10.102 in Bâtiment S. Drop by if you are around!