Philosophical Topology & Planetary Politics

Instructor: Lukáš Likavčan Date & Time: Saturdays May 15, 22, 29, June 5 9:00 to 11:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: This Seminar is designed as an interdisciplinary endeavour at the intersection of philosophy of science and technology, political ecology, geopolitical theory and visual culture. Its main premise departs from an idea that genres of knowledge production that concern socio-political and ecological realities can be studied in a unified manner via technique of philosophical topology, understood as a toolbox for ideation and examination of figures, spaces, and tropes implicit in a given genre of knowledge production. Philosophical topology is paired in this Seminar with a materialistic ontology of culture, anchored in the tools of visual culture studies, German media theory, and the concept of diagrammatic thinking inspired by Gilles Châtelet. These tools allow for a survey of two applied domains of philosophical topology: comparative cosmology and comparative planetology. The first domain – comparative cosmology – draws upon an idea that historical change is not driven by changes in institutional settings and decisions by prima facie political actors but by shifts in the deeper conceptual topology, identified by Bentley B. Allan as cosmologies. The second domain – comparative planetology – develops a series of geopolitical propositions for Post Anthropocene, conditioned by the emergent discourse on the concept of the Planetary and on the ongoing discussions about geoengineering and geodesign. The Seminar culminates in the reading of the present geopolitical situation with respect to climate crisis from the standpoint of the ecological thinking that sees the socio-political and the scientific-technological as the continuum of the ecological, thanks to the technique of philosophical topology.

IMAGE: Solar System planets and the moon

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