Séminaire PRISME - Mathias Thaler - Repetition in Action

Séminaire PRISME | Mathias Thaler | Repetition in Action

Vendredi 29 Mai 2026 à 11h, en salle de réunion de l’Institut Jean Nicod (RdC Pavillon Jardin | 29, rue d’Ulm | 75005 Paris). Nous aurons le plaisir d’écouter Mathias Thaler (Université d’Edimbourg)

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&nbsp ; : 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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