The Ethos of the Event: From Political Eruptions to Climate Change
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Date
2015-03-13
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
This project explores “the event” and its roles in political life, with a focus on articulating an ethos that better attunes us to an eventful world. Prominent among the unexpected events that punctuate political affairs, climate change drives and is driven by an acceleration of pace in several domains of contemporary life. The difficulty in engaging this event is revealed by the denials and deferrals we have faced in forging a political response to it. Thus the question that motivates this study: If an event is diffuse, complex, and elusive, what kind of ethos is needed to recognize, engage, and respond to it? We are in need of an ethos that attends to the kind of sensibility to be developed generally in a world punctuated by events and the existential-spiritual responses most appropriate when we actually encounter one. To forge such an understanding, I examine comparatively Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Foucault. Each of these thinkers has worked through enigmatic, intense, and turbulent events such as the birth of Christ, the death of God, the rise of a fascist leader, and the collapse of a familiar mode of knowing. Climate change belongs to such an order of events. I argue for an experimental and supple ethos that moves beyond anthropocentrism through attunement to both micro- and macro-expressions of climate change. This study challenges political responses that use climate destabilization to seize power, as it deploys a history of previous eruptions to help us engage this one. Critically, climate responsiveness requires a spiritual resolve to dwell in uncertainty and discomfort, while being attached affirmatively to a world that contains tragic elements.
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the event, climate change, political theory, continental philosophy, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schmitt, Foucault