Program

Guilt and Finitude Luca Di Blasi, University of Bern Pessimist interpretations of the Anthropocene and the climate change confront us with the very possibility that we might have already crossed the point of no return and that the end of (large parts of) humanity can no longer be halted. This possible human finitude resembles the individual anticipation of death in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time at the level of human species. The pessimists of the Anthropocene were correspondingly potential activists, representatives of a resoluteness [Entschlossenheit] of the species in which human being is finally perceived in its finitude. By changing the scale from the individual to the species, however, we become aware of a fundamental difference regarding the notion of guilt: at the level of the species, finitude is not only the condition of possibility of becoming guilty, as this is the case for the individual according to Heidegger, but also vice versa: Human's guilt is the ground of a (possible) finitude, the possible nullity of the own species (and at the same time of countless other species or possibilities of life as well). The Adamic connection between guilt and finitude becomes here surprisingly plausible. The meditation of a collective human guilt, including the possibility of a self-inflicted finitude of the human species can lead to an acknowledgement of an "existential human guilt", that allows for wrenching from programs or protocols of self-preservation. And this, exactly, might renew a completely faded notion of “Human's dignity,” without which any attempt at self-preservation would appears empty. At least when this goes together with a new sense of responsibility for other forms of life with whom we are so closely and inseparably related. Luca Di Blasi is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Theological Faculty of the University of Bern in Switzerland and Associate Member of the ICI Berlin. He is currently leading the project "Disagreement Between Religions. Epistemology of Religious Conflicts". His main theoretical interests include philosophy of religion, modern continental philosophy, political theology, and cultural theory. Main publications: Dezentrierungen. Beiträge zur Religion der Philosophie im 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Turia+Kant, 2018); Der weiße Mann. Ein Anti-Manifest (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013); Der Geist in der Revolte. Der Gnostizismus und seine Wiederkehr in der Postmoderne (Munich: Fink, 2002). Countable, Critically Endangered, and Charismatic: Debt, Responsibility, and the Financialization of Wildlife Conservation Kári Driscoll, Utrecht University In the summer of 2019, a new strategy in wildlife conservation was announced: so-called “rhino impact bonds,” which support efforts to conserve African black rhinos, promising a return on investment only if rhino numbers increase. The hope is to create “a conservation debt market” that can be applied to other species. In this paper, I take this latest example of the financialisation of wildlife conservation as an object lesson in the mutual imbrication of guilt, debt, and the human in the age of the Anthropocene. To this end, I will trace a theoretical genealogy that explicitly frames “Man” in terms of debt/guilt, starting with Nietzsche’s famous proposition that “the real problem of Man” consists in his self-production as an animal “allowed to make promises.” The figure of the promise seeks to impose order on the future, to make it predictable (berechenbar), which in turn renders the human calculable and indebted to his past and future actions. From here, I turn to Walter Benjamin’s 1921 fragment, “Capitalism as Religion,” in which he describes capitalism as “a cult that creates guilt, not atonement” and whose ultimate aim is thus not universal salvation but universal debt/guilt. Third, I link these two to Sylvia Wynter’s account of the emergence of homo oeconomicus as the paradigm of the human, whereby capital accumulation is “projected as the indispensable, empirical, and metaphysical source of all human life.” Against this backdrop, the strived-for accumulation of rhinos through finance can be seen as an extension of the principle of universal debt to the entire natural world. As the impact bonds’ creator explains, black rhinos were chosen as a flagship species because they are “countable, critically endangered and charismatic” (Anthony Sguazzin). In other words, they are berechenbar in much the same way as Nietzsche’s guilt-ridden sovereign individual. Thus, the financialization of wildlife conservation can be seen as an attempt to breed yet another animal that is able to make promises. Kári Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He holds a PhD in German from Columbia University. His primary research interests lie within the field of literary animal studies. He is the editor, with Eva Hoffmann, of What Is Zoopoetics? – Texts, Bodies, Entanglement (Palgrave Macmillan 2018) and, with Susanne C. Knittel, of “Memory after Humanism,” a special issue of Parallax (2017). His current research project, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), is entitled “Reading Zoos in the Age of the Anthropocene.” Von Klimasündern, Flugscham und moralischen Streckübungen: Ökologisches Bewusstsein im Anthropozän Ana Honnacker, Forschungsinstitut für Philosophie Hannover Die Idee des Anthropozäns ist längst mehr als eine geowissenschaftliche Hypothese – sie hat sich als diagnostisches Konzept in den Geistesund Kulturwissenschaften etabliert. Mit Blick auf den umweltphilosophischen Diskurs stellt diese Aneignung ein deutliches Gegennarrativ zu den seit Mitte der 1970er Jahre eingeforderten Versuchen der De-Zentrierung des Menschen dar, wie sie etwa in tiefenökologischen und anderen biozentristischen Ansätzen unternommen wurden. Denn die normative Pointe des Anthropozäns ist es, den Herrschaftsund Gestaltungsanspruch des Menschen über die Natur nicht etwa zu überwinden, sondern gerade auszuführen. Damit gerät auch die Frage nach Verantwortung und Schuld wieder verstärkt in den Fokus, die in der Umweltethik bislang eine seltsam untergeordnete Rolle spielte. Zum einen ist die Zuschreibung von Verantwortung in Bezug auf kollektive Handlungen, wie sie etwa CO2Emissionen oder die Überfischung der Weltmeere darstellen, schwierig, zumal wenn sie zusätzlich erst kommende Generationen betreffen werden. Zum anderen wird vor einer vermeintlichen Moralisierung gewarnt: Dem Klimawandel sei nicht durch Schuldzuweisungen und „shaming“ beizukommen, da dies eher Abwehrreaktionen auslöse. Dagegen werde ich in meinem Paper dafür argumentieren, dass die ökologische Krise auch auf eine unterentwickelte moralische Imagination zurückzuführen ist und der Rede von Schuld eine wichtige Funktion in Bezug auf deren Ausweitung zukommt. Nur wenn das Individuum sich als verantwortungsvoller Akteur wahrnimmt, ist die Grundlage für die Transformation hin zu einer nachhaltigen Lebensweise geschaffen. Im Anthropozän zu leben bedeutet daher auch, mit der Schuld leben zu lernen. Ana Honnacker ist wissenschaftliche Assistentin des Direktors am Forschungsinstitut für Philosophie Hannover. Sie studierte Philosophie, kath. Theologie und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft an der Universität Münster. Von 2009 bis 2013 war sie wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Institut für Theologie und Sozialethik der TU Darmstadt und Stipendiatin am DFG-Graduiertenkolleg „Theologie als Wissenschaft“ an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, wo sie 2014 ihre Promotion mit einer Arbeit zu William James abschloss. Sie ist Gründungsmitglied des German Pragmatism Network und Mitglied der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Religionsphilosophie. Sie forscht u.a. im Bereich der Religionsphilosophie (Religion und Moderne, Religionskritik), der politischen Philosophie (Demokratie als Lebensform) und der Umweltphilosophie (Klimawandel und gesellschaftliche Transformation), ihr Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf dem Pragmatismus. For Want of a Respondent: Forgiveness and Climate Guilt Juliane Prade-Weiss, University of Vienna Arendt describes “the human condition” as “conditionality”: Humans “are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence.” In this contingent relationship with the earth (Macready), the concept of guilt is a key regulator, articulated as economical, juridical, and theological indebtedness. Relationality implies an exchange, the character of which is profoundly re-negotiated in view of the climate crisis: Ecological dept and climate guilt are discussed as new juridical and economical categories for identifying and punishing agents of the destruction of ecosystems. Much like the popular catchphrase of flight shame, the models of ecological dept, climate guilt, footprints etc. carry strong moral connotations and can, as such, be conceptualized in accordance to Elias’ understanding of shame and guilt as psychic figurations for the regulation of societal interdependencies. Their status in a complex interdependency with nonhuman agents and phenomena such as climate, however, is unclear. The concern of ecological discourses transcends the realm of societal interdependence and gestures toward a relationality in which the position of the respondent is acutely vacant: While certain animals give responses that can be understood as such, and ecosystems certainly respond to intervention, the particularities of causation and owing action – the two aspects of the concept guilt – are everything but clear in the latter, global case but subject to examination, doubt, polemics, and a reduction to a feedback-loop of sovereign human agency. Until the 17th century, the “economy of the natural world” referred to its usability as much as to its divine order (Bühler). The religious understanding has been cut off since, but the position it marks has been filled, not least, with the capitalist deomorphism of “the market.” E