Centre for Culture and Ecology Seminar Series - Professor Matthias Fritsch

'Intergenerational Turn-Taking on the Geokinetic View of the Earth'

This talk seeks to offer a response to environmental destabilization by linking my account of intergenerational justice as turn-taking with the idea of a second Copernican revolution and a geokinetic view of the earth. The argument will proceed in four steps. (1) First, I suggest that recent proposals calling on us to respond to the Anthropocene by situating lived human time in deep or geological time should be supplemented by generational time, and thus, by the ethics of human generations following one another. (2) To conceptualize intergenerational justice, I briefly review my proposal for human generations taking turns with the earth. (3) I then suggest that the earth is not an external, exchangeable object that we may or may not use, but is constitutive of generations being able to come about and take turns in the first place. In this sense, earth also takes turns with us. (4) To further specify the perhaps puzzling notion that the earth takes turns with generations, I discuss what some (Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, Thomas Nail, and others) have called the second Copernican revolution. According to this new view, the earth not only moves around the sun, but is internally on the move, its geokinetic processes co-constituting human beings. The earth not only revolves around the sun, as if in undifferentiated space without any form of agency, but pulls us into its internal movement and co-responsive conduct. The environmental crises in our very midst demand a reconceptualization of space as counter-Copernican and time as always already intergenerational.

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