The Global Politics of Hope - Resistance and Critique beyond Destruction
This lecture responds to the urgency to grasp the utopian content of present struggles and grassroots experiments seeking to create alternative forms of social reproduction that create a habitable and enjoyable planet. The world's multidimensional 'crisis' necessitates urgent and bold responses. The unprecedented global situation combines economic, energy, food, poverty, climate, political and environmental emergencies and requires an urgent re-evaluation of humanity's problems. The increasing impossibility of attaining a peaceful, sustainable, and dignified human and non-human life on the planet denotes a 'crisis of civilisation' (Burch and Tamayo; Lander; Escobar). I posit that the key to unlocking the critical global situation resides with those communities creating alternative practices for sustainable life at the grassroots. Their significance of vital practices for a transition from planet crisis to Planet Hope cannot be overemphasised. However, critical theorists remain unconvinced and insist that any attempt to create an alternative will become absorbed into the system; therefore, following T.W. Adorno, they suggest that all we can do is say NO. I explore this epistemological/ political disconnect between contemporary global radical praxis and critical theory. By considering Ernst Bloch's materialist philosophy of hope and his ontology of becoming, I argue that prefigurative struggles are not 'positive praxis' -as neo-Adornian critical theorists insinuate, but 'critical affirmations' that offer a sophisticated form of negation: to embrace life against destruction. The global politics of hope is a decolonising, feminist, pluriversal form of politics that navigates contradictions seeking to weave situated resistances into a global tapestry of collective actions in defence of life. By so doing, they create alternative social synthesis to the capitalist-colonial-heteropatriarchal that dominates the world today.
The lecture will be held in English.
Registration for the lecture is mandatory. You can register via this page.
Read more about our lecture series here.