Lecture: An Ecology of Earth-Beings

On 3 April 2024, from 16:30 to 18:00, Dr Federico Luisetti (University of St. Gallen) will give a lecture on his latest publication Nonhuman Subjects: An Ecology of Earth-Beings (Cambridge UP, 2023). The event is moderated by Dr. Monica Jansen (Italian Language and Culture). Dr. Michela Borzaga (Comparative Literature) and Dr. Rick Dolphijn (Media and Performance Studies) will both provide a response to the lecture.

Stones, valleys, rivers are “earth-beings”, geobodies exposed to immense forces of commodification and extraction. But how can we speak of nonbiological “bodies” without falling into the trap of biocentrism? Can we think of natural subjects that are not overdetermined by the imaginary of organic life and human personhood? What is an ecology of nonlife? How do we relate to earth-beings in the context of the contemporary polycrisis?

Earth-beings question deep-seated Western notions of life and personhood. Mountains in the Andes, erratic boulders, a landfill in the Swiss Alps, the “sacred stones” of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, and the work of contemporary artists that have engaged with nonlife reveal the aesthetic and political subjectivity of beings that are not sentient and alive as biological organisms. From rocks and rivers, we can learn what earthly subjects do and look like, when all-too-human preoccupations do not blind the gaze.

This event is co-hosted by Critical Pathways and the Network for Environmental Humanities and is organized in collaboration with the department of Italian language and culture.

Federico Luisetti 

Federico Luisetti is Associate Professor of Italian Studies and the Environmental Humanities at the University of St. Gallen. He is the author of books and essays on critical theory, including Nonhuman Subjects. An Ecology of Earth-Beings (Cambridge UP, 2023) and the The Anomie of the Earth: Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas (with John Pickles and Wilson Kaiser, eds., Duke UP 2015). He is the coordinator of Unruly Natures, a collaborative research project and network in political ecology.    

Respondents         

Dr. Michela Borzaga is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She holds a PhD in Anglophone literature from the University of Vienna. Her dissertation was awarded the Dr Maria Schaumayer Prize in 2018. Her research interests include critical theory, South African literature, memory and trauma studies, poetics, (post)colonial thinking, gender and motherhood studies, thing studies.

Dr. Rick Dolphijn is an associate professor at Media and Culture Studies, with an interest in transdisciplinary research at large. He published widely on continental philosophy (Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres) and the contemporary arts. He studies posthumanism, new materialism, material culture (food studies), and ecology.