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Abstract: The talk proposes a concept of justice for future people that is mindful of Indigenous critiques of the ‘Anthropocene’ and associated climate horror scenarios. I first review these critiques, which suggest that motivating pro-futural care by dreading an impending climate crisis tends to betray a privileged, often settler-colonial perspective. The beneficiaries of colonialism now have the “luxury” of viewing the environmental crisis as one that lies wholly in the future, even if that future starts here, while many Indigenous communities have been living with such a crisis for a long time. On this basis, I then review various Indigenous account of intergenerational relations, in which I find one fundamental and common idea in the claim that present generations owe to descendants because they received a gift from ancestors. Drawing on Marcel Mauss’s work on the premodern and Indigenous notion of the gift, I seek to model and defend this view and its social ontology (I call it ‘asymmetrical reciprocity’). The final section seeks to show how intergenerational reciprocity can help to demarginalize the future: above all, by disallowing a linear view of time according to which a focus on the future permits the neglect of the past. Hence, climate ethics and intergenerational justice must face the history of colonialism.
Matthias Fritsch is Full Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University, Montréal. He is the author of The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida (SUNY Press, 2005), and Taking Turns with the Earth: Phenomenology, Deconstruction, and Intergenerational Justice (Stanford University Press, 2018). He co-edited Reason and Emancipation (Humanity Books, 2007); Eco-Deconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy (Fordham University Press, 2018); Environmental Philosophy and East Asia: Nature, Time, Responsibility (Routledge, 2022); and Phenomenology and Future Generations (SUNY Press, in process). He has published over 40 articles in scholarly journals and chapters in anthologies, and translated authors such as Heidegger, Gadamer, and Habermas into English. He has been a Humboldt Fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt, a Visiting Research Professor at Kyoto University, and is Senior Research Fellow at Western Sydney University. In 2023, he will be Humboldt Fellow at Free University Berlin. Continuing to work on environmental and intergenerational politics, he is currently writing a short book on civil disobedience in the face of global heating (Antigone in the Anthropocene), and researching a monograph on phenomenology and the sources of normative critical theory.
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Event location
Institute for Advanced Sustainability StudiesBerliner Str. 130
14467 Potsdam
Deutschland
Coordinates (lat, long):
52.406166, 13.073284
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