Rethinking Ecology and Sustainability
Two prominent thinkers, Kate Soper and Allan Stoekl, are addressing the need for rethinking our place in nature, and how we produce, consume and act in thought-provoking ways.
The event is presented by CApE and The Academy of Existential Philosophy (Eksistensfilosofisk Akademi). The conversation is moderated by Lector Emeritus Sune Frølund and PhD-Fellow Jon Auring Grimm.
In the shadow of the ongoing climate- and biodiversity crisis, it is crucial that we rethink our place in nature, and how we produce, consume and act. Soper recommends an alternative hedonism, a different way of life and a vision for a post-growth society in her work Post-Growth Living. Stoekl invites us to rethink sustainability and revitalizes it in his work Three Sustainabilities. At this event, they will present their perspectives and engage in a conversation on ecology and sustainability.
Kate Soper is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and a former researcher at the Institute for the Study of European Transformations at London Metropolitan University. She has held an Honorary Professorship at the University of Brighton and has a long association with Radical Philosophy. She has been an editorial collective member and writer for New Left Review and a regular columnist for the US-based journal, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.
Soper is a translator, among others, of Noberto Bobbio, Michel Foucault, Cornelius Castoriadis and Carlo Ginsburg. Her books include: Troubled Pleasures: Writings on Politics, Gender and Hedonism (1981); Humanism and antihumanism (1986); What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (1995); To Relish the Sublime? Culture and selfrealisation in postmodern times (co-author, 2001); Citizenship and Consumption (co-edited; 2009); The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently (coedited; 2009).
Soper was a lead researcher in the project on ‘Alternative Hedonism, and the theory and politics of consumption’ funded in the ESRC/AHRC Cultures of Consumption project, 2004-2006. She has been involved in several research projects on climate change and sustainable consumption, most recently as a Visiting Fellow at the Pufendorf Institute, Lund University, Sweden. Soper’s book Post-Growth Living: for an alternative hedonism was published by Verso in 2020.
Allan Stoekl is an Emeritus Professor of French and comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University. He has lectured extensively in the US and abroad and has served as Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins and Westminster University (London).
Stoekl’s recent work has focused on issues of energy use, sustainability, and economy in a literary-cultural and philosophical context. These subjects are at the forefront of his latest publication The Three Sunstainablities – energy, economy, time (2021) and the initial publication Bataille’s Peak - Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (2007). Additional books include Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris, and Ponge (1986) and Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition (1992). He is the translator of Maurice Blanchot’s The Most High, (2001), and has edited and translated Georges Bataille: Visions of Excess – selected writings, 1927-1939 (1985) and On Bataille, Yale French Studies (1990).