The Polish Journal of Aesthetics
58 (3/2020)

Editors: Thomas Dutoit (University of Lille, France), Aleksander Kopka (Jagiellonian University, Poland), Katarzyna Szopa (University of Silesia, Poland).

Now that the perspective of climate catastrophe is looming ever closer we are urged to think of the climate change radically and decisively. This demand however does not impose on us a mere change of climate in our social and political relations, but first and foremost, a radical change in perception, laws, and politics that should bear witness and respond to the environmental crisis and the loss of lives (across the multiple borders between vegetal, animal, and human). This compels us not only to rethink notions of pace, action, and practice in terms of what should inevitably become the eco-politics, but also of invention and implementation of political and juridical solutions that would no longer be compelled to render a justice essentially determined by its anthropocentric and capitalistic presuppositions. In fact, such a justice would be nothing more than a betrayal of justice.

And since, as Jacques Derrida argues, justice has always to address the unrecognized other, we should therefore focus on the eco-political situation of those lives (vegetal, animal, and human) deprived of their ‘rights’ (the term however may be anthropocentric), and place whose survival not only is inextricable from our own but should also become the most pressing ethical task. By “survival” however we do not mean a primitive striving of some privileged homogeneous group to immunize its life at the cost of the others, but rather affirmation of mortality and vulnerability of the other, and therefore of responsibility for the other.

We would like to examine how this environmental injunction should affect and transform the dominant philosophical and political concepts of community, democracy, property, and rights, but also, if it could serve as an impulse to a thorough critique of capitalocene, the epoch of massive exhaustion and extermination of the natural reserves. We are therefore open to eco-political strategies that represent a wide range of perspectives like ecofeminism, eco-marxism, deconstruction, biopolitics, postcolonial ecocriticism, environmental studies, environmental art, philosophy, literature, etc. What is more, we are interested how the work of contemporary thinkers can serve as instruments of shaping a just culture respectful of all underprivileged and endangered lives.

We invite Authors from various research areas to submit articles concerning the topic of ecology, climate crisis, and environmental humanities, or related to the following questions:

  • environmental migrations: the question of climate migrants and refugees
  • (dis)united Europe and its role in the infinite task of environmental protection
  • inheriting and sharing the unshareable Earth in contrast to the politics of appropriation and capitalistic exploitation
  • eco-critique of technological development
  • ecosystem as the new political community
  • ecological economy and sexual/sexuate difference
  • eco-critique in the perspective of postcolonial studies
  • non-human labour and zoo-proletariat
  • ecology and theory of common goods
  • ecological deployment of feminist theories and actions against new forms of capitalist accumulation
  • militant art as eco-political activism
  • political consequences of anthropocentric portrayal of vegetal and animal life.

 

Submission deadline: March 31, 2020.


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