The coming catastrophe poses a challenge to thinking. Only recently have the interrelated events of human-induced climate change and mass extinction begun to unfold as a global media event of proportional magnitude. The proliferation of discourses around impending anthropogenic doom seems to have reached a virtualtipping point, from which there is no return to a “business as usual”-attitude. As the environmental conditions on which all human life depends change in ever more alarming rates, there seem to be few aspects of life, of policy making, and of theoretical work, that can remain unchanged. Scholars in the field of cultural and media theory, particularly in Weimar, are used to observing phenomena of change in terms of their historical becoming. While the identification of the historical causes (and causers) of anthropogenic change is decisive for the assessment of “what there is to be done”, the current situation is unique in that it also challenges habitual modes of thinking and forces us to train our eyes on the things to come.
As a part of this semesters "Bauhaus.Module", the lecture series "The Coming Catastrophe" invites everyone to Samo Tomšič's upcoming lecture on "The Culture of Death Drive: Capital and the End of the World".
Samo Tomšič studied Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and received his PhD from the university’s Institute of Philosophy for a thesis entitled »What is Anti-Philosophy?« in 2008. Previously he worked for the Scientific Research Centre at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Between 2011 and 2013, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Department of German Literature at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His current research centres on the philosophical questions of formalisation, the history of rationalism, and the topicality of the structuralist programme.