Beauty rethought: situated and ambivalent

What if we began to think of reason as plural — reasons or reasonings — rather than the monolithic "Reason" from on high? What would it be like to think with all five senses, going beyond our habitual ocularcentrism? What if affect were both disruptor and the source of our greatest inflexibility? What role does ritual have in metabolizing the whole spectrum of human affect, both individually and collectively? What relationship holds between beauty and ethics in times such as these? What can art, philosophy, and activism learn from one another? How can we create alliances across sociological divides that habitually keep theorists and activists separate? Finally, how can we create more plausible scenarios of hope for a greater number of people? 

This conversation was possibly the most wide-ranging we’ve had so far on the podcast. As you’ll hear, Dr Kilian Jörg is a capacious and audacious thinker, and has reflected long and hard on some of modernity’s most recalcitrant (and most insidious) problems: problems ranging from the climate crisis to the loss of ritual, from polarization to ‘the hope gap.’ But they don’t just do the hard thinking; they are also engaging with these problems from the ground up, reaching across sociological divides that may seem unbridgeable to many. A kaleidoscopic thinker, Kilian is as fluent in the realm of philosophy — drawing from Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, and Michel Serres — as they are in the world of art and ecological justice, inspired by the likes of Timothy Morton and Elin Kelsey. All in all, this conversation was a masterclass in what it means to refuse the dualisms between thinking and acting, between theory and activism, and to invoke the possibility of pluralism in the face of pure criticality. 

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Dr Kilian Jörg works both artistically and philosophically on the topic of ecological catastrophe and how its transformative forces can best be imagined and deployed. Previous publications have covered themes as wide ranging as club culture, the political backlash from an ecological perspective, cultivating distance in catastrophic times, and a speculative religion of waste. Their current research topics are the car as a metaphor for our toxic entanglements with modern lifestyles (released in book form as “Das Auto und die ökologische Katastrophe” in 2024), the socio-psychological effects of living with ecocide, and radical activist strategies of reclaiming land like the ZAD in France (published as "Durchlöchert den Status Quo!" in 2025). Kilian is working both in theory as well as artistic and activist practice on how to create rituals that enable us to cultivate more complex feelings in times of collapse. They currently teach at the School of Transformation at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the program Plastic and Environment at the Art University of Linz. Furthermore, they are affiliated with various collectives, such as the Futurama.Lab, Stoffwechsel - Ecologies of Collaboration, and the CRC Affective Societies at the FU Berlin.

More about our guest: www.kilianj.org | Paper referenced: "Affect as Disruption: Affective Experimentation, Automobility, and the Ecological Crisis"

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