THALER Mathias

Mathias Thaler, Professeur de théorie politique à l’université d’Édimbourg

Accueillant.es à l’institut

Jérôme DOKIC et Margherita ARCANGELI

Équipe

PRISME : Perception, Représentation, Imagination, Spatialité, Mémoire, Emotion

CONTACT | SITE WEB

Professeur invité de l’EHESS à l’Institut Jean Nicod du xx Mai au xx juin 2026

Mathias Thaler is Professor of Political Theory in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His main research interest is in contemporary political theory. Thaler regularly teaches courses on democratic theory, populism, human rights and the morality of war and violence. From 2020 to 2023, he served as Co-Director of Research in the School of Social and Political Science.

Thaler is the author of No Other Planet (Cambridge University Press 2022), Naming Violence (Columbia University Press 2018), Moralische Politik oder politische Moral ? (Campus 2008), and co-editor (with Mihaela Mihai) of Political Violence and the Imagination (Routledge 2020) and of On the Uses and Abuses of Political Apologies (Palgrave 2014). His papers have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Environmental Politics, European Journal of Political Theory, Perspectives on Politics, Political Studies, Political Theory, and Review of Politics, amongst others.

His recent research has been funded through a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant from the European Commission (2013–2017), through a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (2020–2021) and through an AHRC Networking Grant (2023–2026). Thaler has moreover been the recipient of competitive awards from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Theodor Körner Fonds and the Gulbenkian Foundation, as well as smaller funders. Over the past 15 years, Thaler has held visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford, the Université de Montréal, KU Leuven, the University of Sydney, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.

Séminaires à l’Institut Jean Nicod

Lecture #1 | PRI Séminaire "Sciences humaines et spatiales"
Jeudi 28 Mai 2026, 14h-16h | Salle de réunion IJN, RDC Pavillon Jardin

"Transition or Interregnum ?"
In our times, talk of ‘transitioning’ to a world without fossil fuels has become pervasive. Despite its prevalence in environmental politics, this article argues that it is counterproductive to envisage the current conjuncture through the prism of a transition. I defend this claim by first outlining three respects in which the transition paradigm falls short : political corruptibility, historical inadequacy and conceptual confusion. Rather than recuperate the meaning of transitioning for progressive purposes, the constructive part of the article then asks which analytical framework should take its place. My proposal is to take inspiration from Antonio Gramsci’s notion of an interregnum to illuminate the distinctive political challenges of the Anthropocene. Gramsci’s conceptual apparatus foregrounds the fundamental openness of the future and thus facilitates a better understanding of various ‘morbid symptoms’, whose proliferation today can only be explained through a theoretical approach that combines attention to both individual well-being and social pathologies. This perspective also affects techno-optimist celebrations of our species’ ingenuity and skill, such as when megalomaniac billionaires like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos fantasize about space travel as a "solution" to the problems of climate change. In the fantasy realm dreamed up by today’s oligarchic class, under no circumstances must there be any space left for uncertainty, lest the immense perils and (unexpected opportunities) of an organic crisis become apparent.

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Lecture #2 | Séminaire IJN PRISME
Vendredi 29 Mai 2026, 11h-12h30 | Salle de réunion IJN, RDC Pavillon Jardin

"Repetition in Action"
One of the most perplexing aspects of life on a climate-changed planet concerns the status of human action. As Donna Haraway observes (2016), we appear to be stuck between a rock and a hard place : on the hand, there is the “position that the game is over, it’s too late, there’s no sense trying to make anything any better” and, on the other side, we encounter “the comic faith in technofixes”. In this lecture, my goal is to investigate how we might overcome this persistent stalemate and recover a type of action that is properly adjusted to the exigencies of the climate emergency. Building on Sharon Krause’s re-conceptualization of nonsovereign, normatively inflected agency (2023), I shall demonstrate that a critical turn to Søren Kierkegaard’s discussion of repetition provides valuable resources for precisely such an endeavour. “Repetition” (Kierkegaard 2009) here means, surprisingly, the complete opposite of business as usual. Rather, Kierkegaard’s thoughts reveal a mode of acting that allows us to get the world back at the very moment when all seems lost. Paradoxically, this only becomes an option once an agent forsakes the pretence of control and mastery over their environment. The lecture will suggest that this complex notion of agency, and the attendant conception of existential
attunement (via memory, faith, resignation, hope and anxiety,), is best suited for navigating the disconcerting reality of the Anthropocene.

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Lecture #3 | Séminaire ICARUS
Lundi 1er Juin 2026, 14h-16h

"Acting Otherwise in the face of Ecological Collapse"
Pervasive patterns of inaction in the face of ecological collapse affect all aspects of domestic and international politics today. This paper argues that dominant responses to this kind of dithering, like ruptural transformation and accommodationist adaptation, fail to tackle the underlying problem – disavowing the actual gravity of the escalating crisis. To address this shortcoming, I turn to Günther Anders’s concept of “apocalypse indifference”. Based on a detailed reading of this underappreciated author, I defend what I call the “political logic of infinite delay”, which recognizes that decisive action is required to respond to the climate emergency, without, however, embracing the idea that ecological collapse can be completely avoided. Anders’s “prophylactic apocalypticism” relies on the cultivation of a specific type of fear to effectively combat denialism. The paper concludes by illustrating this instructive process through the recent use of die-ins and funeral rites by environmental protest movements.

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Lecture #4 | Séminaire ICARUS
Lundi 8 Juin 2026, 14h-16h

"Estrangement on a Strange Planet"
In this lecture, I will explore the ways in which the Anthropocene affects one of the key functions of narrative art : the production of estrangement. Elaborating on Eva Horn’s work (2020), I show that, on a climate-changed planet, latency (“slow violence”), then entanglement of human and more-than-human worlds, and a clash of spatial and temporal scales pose new formal challenges to the repertoire of literature (and other artforms). These challenges are instructive beyond literary studies insofar as they also concern the emancipatory impact that experiences of estrangement are supposed to exert on readers and spectators, allowing them to see their ordinary habits from unexpected angles and thereby enabling them to transform their lifeworlds. Since, as Svetlana Boym reminds us (2019), defamiliarization has both an aesthetic and a political dimension, what role should it play on a planet that is already so strange that we are now not only facing various problems of collective action, but also a veritable crisis of imagination ? My argument will be that, if estrangement devices are to occupy a central role in the aesthetics and politics of the Anthropocene, they need to become attuned to its specific nature. And that is, unsurprisingly, a difficult endeavour, which partly explains why it is so hard to undo the currently dominant social imaginaries : business as usual, solutionist techno-fixes and apocalyptic fatalism.