Emanuele Coccia (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris), “Loving the Planet: How to Turn Ecology into Planetary Erotics” (Department of Spanish and Portuguese)

Event time: 
Thursday, September 29, 2022 - 1:00pm
Location: 
HQ 136 (320 York Street) See map
Event description: 

Contemporary ecological discourse and science oscillate between the affirmation of a love that would occur spontaneously among living beings and the prescription of a compulsory love accompanied by a spirit of repentance. By its own confession, the problem of ecology is an erotic problem: we fail to love the planet. We have not been educated or accustomed to thinking of love as something that can affect individuals belonging to different species or kingdoms: and as we see in fairy tales, we are ready to love a frog only if it turns into a prince. This talk will ask what it means to think about nature as if the relationships that bind species are (as complicated as) love relationships and if we can understand what love is, in its original and paradigmatic form as that which always binds us to individuals of other species.

Admission: 
Free
Open to: 
General Public