In the wake of the Anthropocene, the human and social sciences have in recent
decades experienced an important ontological-analytical shift of focus towards the non-human beings that humans co-exist with
and whom their livelihoods depend on. This turn has been crucial in re-distributing agencies towards nonhumans, and in restoring
a sensibility for other living beings and humans.
However, in this talk Schultz argues that getting closer to non-humans
is not the only analytical strategy we need if we wish to face our times crisis of sensibilities. Instead, based on his book Land
Sickness, Schultz argues that we also need descriptions of how the existential conditions of the human being has transformed
in the Anthropocene, how the human has transformed into another kind of being, one leaving behind a set of destructive traces
that is slowly but certainly destroying its own species’ conditions of subsistence.
In recent years, Danish
sociologist Nikolaj Schultz (1990), PhD Fellow at Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, has emerged as an influential
voice in social theory and ecological thinking. Schultz was a close collaborator of late French philosopher Bruno Latour (1947-2022)
in the years before his passing. In 2022, Schultz and Latour co-authored
On the Emergence of an Ecological Class.
A Memo (translated from French by Julie Rose, Polity Books, 2023), a short text on how to construct from below a strong political
subject ready to fight for the habitability of the planet in the wake of global climate change.
A year after its publication,
the book was translated in more than a dozen languages and quickly became a point of inspiration for political actors such
as the Green Party in France (EELV) and the German Climate Movement (in German:
Zur Entstehung einer ökologischen Klasse,
Suhrkamp 2022). Later the same year, Schultz published Land Sickness (Polity Books, 2023), currently translated into eight
languages, a hybrid text that he calls an “auto-etnografictive essay” on the sociological and existential questions that the
Anthropocene force us to pose. It is available in German as
Landkrank (translated by Michael Bischoff, published
by Suhrkamp 2024).
Related events - joint programme:Reading
Rave & Cucina Alchimia
