Climate Sorrow, lecture by Judith Butler

Thank you for your inquiries. We are currently receiving many questions regarding the sold-out status of the open lecture. We, unfortunately, do not have the capacity to answer all the questions - but we are glad to inform you that the lecture will be available as a podcast afterwards.

We are happy to invite you to an open lecture with Judith Butler as a part of the CApE Festival: Verdensomsorg og klimakrise.

Sign up for the event.

Although some have argued that political activism depends upon setting mourning aside, others have argued that mourning can be a source of political resistance, even a way to establish and preserve the solidarity between the living and the dead.   

In places of war, occupation, and siege, the living is unjustly vanquished and extinguished, and the loss, especially mass loss, is both marked and opposed by acts of public mourning. The problem is not just that lives were lost, but that injustice has been committed, which means that mourning is in its collective form also a demand for justice.  

But when we consider the kind of loss we are undergoing as the earth continues to lose its regenerative powers, as biospheres are destroyed, and soil and air increasingly toxified by carbon emissions, we are once again mourning what is lost and objecting to an injustice.   

Although some have argued that a focus on climate sorrow is apolitical and anthropocentric, this lecture argues that climate sorrow involves the recognition of human living as part of a disappearing network of life, that it calls for a de-centring of egocentric ethics in favour of a relational one, and it extends relationality not only between different forms of life, but between the living, the dead, and the becoming dead. 

After the lecture, Mikkel Krause Frantzen, associate professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, will interview and engage in a dialogue with Judith Butler.  

There will be 320 seats in the auditorium in which the lecture will take place and another 150 seats in an adjacent auditorium in which the lecture will be live-streamed (streaming only available on-site). We operate with a first-come-first-serve policy for the auditorium seats. There will only be seats for those who have registered

Judith Butler is a Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and formerly the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They received their Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. They are the author of several books including Gender Trouble (1990), Bodies That Matter (1993), and Precarious Life (2004), that have been translated into more than twenty languages and have significantly shaped the evolution of gender and sexuality studies, critical theory and other related fields in the humanities and social sciences dedicated to the pursuit of social justice.