Slavoj Žižek’s keynote at the conference “Politics of Nature: Philosophical Perspectives on the Anthropocene” (Oct 20-21, 2022), organized by the CPKP and the ICI Berlin.
“Unbehagen in der Natur”: On Thinking the End of Nature: It is as if the Earth is gradually turning into Trisolaris, a strange planet from The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin’s sci-fi masterpiece. Trisolaris has three suns which rise and set at strange and unpredictable intervals: sometimes too far away and horribly cold, sometimes far too close and destructively hot, and sometimes not seen for long periods of time. Devastating hurricanes, droughts, and floods, not to mention global warming – do they all not indicate the appearance of something for which the only appropriate term is ‘the end of nature’? (‘Nature’ is understood here in the traditional sense: a regular rhythm of seasons, the reliable background of human history, something on which one can count always to be there.)
