Kilian Jörg plays with new ways of being toward nature and puzzles over the pitfalls of Reason

Kilian Jörg is an artist and philosopher who is interested in understanding how art can intervene to disrupt the ecological catastrophe we’re currently witnessing. His current research focuses on the car as a metaphor for the toxic behaviors of modernity, the psychological effects of living in a time of ecocide and what sorts of activist strategies for reclaiming land might be effective at shaking off the psychology of resignation.

My conversation with Kilian Jorg was one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve ever done on writing and thinking. There’s something very refreshing about the way that Kilian thinks about the act of writing in the university. I’m not sure where it came from, but the more tactile and situated sort of theorizing he is able to do makes me want to spend more time with the texts that he looks at and really engage with the threads there. 

Because he’s using them to weave together different concepts of liberation, with the ultimate goal, I think, of showing how to fight the imposition of one worldview on the planet. Kilian is fighting to defend other possible methods of reasoning. It might not be a magical solution for our ecological crisis, but I found that talking to Kilian about the ideas in Ecological Reasonings opened up approaches to problems like what to do about Donald Trump or artificial intelligence or our attachment to the car as a convenience we can’t live without, regardless of what it does to us. 

One of the wonderful things about his book is that it is using this idea of the “resilience of Reason” to deconstruct and decompose the current technocratic world order — he’s saying that there is a continuum between Trump, the narrowing of political possibilities, and Monorationalism. 

What he wants is a world where we are actively “nourishing ground for many other voices to be heard.” Where we are consciously worrying about and destabilizing the relationship between the things we consider active, aggressive and ambitious, and the things we consider passive, wasteful and directionless.