That societies face natural disasters is a historical constant. However, in recent decades we have been facing an increasing number of such events due to climate change. Apart from the human tragedies and the technical-social challenges that these developments pose, they also call into question our categories of thought and democratic life. The classical understanding of ‘nature’ as passive, controlled, or as an unchanging backdrop to human action that prevails in modern philosophy has become untenable in the face of recent environmental debates. Such observations underpin a heterogeneous group of theories that is summarized under the umbrella term "new materialism." While this new materialist perspective is particularly good at capturing the general entanglements that are crucial to questions of science and ecological devastation, this perspective also has implications for understanding democracy. Despite heated debate, there is no systematic study of the new materialist debate on these issues. Therefore, my project examines the question of how democracy and democratic politics are conceptualized in the new materialist debate. In the talk, I present the general outline of the project and discuss some preliminary results.
About the speaker: Simon Clemens is a doctoral researcher with the Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS)" at Free University of Berlin and a visiting scholar with the European Union Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.