Event overview
A lecture by Martin Savransky
How, on a planet rendered forever unstable and unsafe, might we go on imagining what it might mean to live with those with whom we can imagine sharing the earth under our feet and what it might take to live alongside those with whom we cannot? While social and political thinkers today call (yet again) for renewed forms of cosmopolitan solidarity Martin Savransky raises some inconvenient questions concerning the co-implications of the cosmopolitan imagination and the colonisation of the earth.
Lured by the promise and providence of perpetual peace, the modern cosmopolitan tradition has laid out a programme for perpetual war. Refusing the war for peace that cosmopolitanism deems proper to us, he wagers that learning to live tenaciously in terrains of historic and planetary upheaval may require more collective improvisation than normative regulation, more fragmentary experimentation than world-administration.
In this way, he attends to aspects of the history and sociality of quilombo (or marronage) as speculative infrastructures of dissensual coexistence on unstable terrain. In their refusal to be content with what the modern world deemed proper to the colonised and the enslaved, in their insistent embrace of unruly sociality, of the tumultuous improvisation of social life out-on-the-outside, quilombos might activate the imagination in a world that cares not whether most live or die. On an earth out of joint with itself, they might teach us something but about what it might take to go on making social life otherwise in the absence of a common world.
Working across philosophy and the environmental humanities, Martin Savransky’s writing seeks to activate speculative methodologies of life on an earth unstable and unsafe. He is the author of Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse (Duke University Press, 2021) and The Adventure of Relevance: An Ethics of Social Inquiry (with a foreword by Isabelle Stengers; Palgrave, 2016), and the co-editor of After Progress (Sage, 2022) and of Speculative Research: The Lure of Possible Futures (Routledge, 2017). He has published essays in forums such as Theory, Culture & Society, Social Text, The Sociological Review, and SubStance: A Review of Literary and Cultural Criticism.
He is currently working on a new book length project (tentatively) titled Exology: Planetary Social Life and the Force of the Outside. Savransky is Reader and Director of the Centre for Critical Global Change at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he convenes the MA Ecology, Culture & Society.
This lecture is part of the Visual Culture Department Public Programme.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 22 Feb 2024 | 6:00pm - 8:00pm |
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