There is a strange asymmetry in how we deal with two different crises that are simultaneously shattering the world of our time. Global warming is confronted with standard strategies and practices of a peaceful democratic Realpolitik: endless negotiations of countless parties with due regard for their most particular interests, pragmatic compromises, non-binding agreements, dodged conflicts, appeasements. On the other side, the ongoing wars in Europe and the Middle East are perceived in most existential terms: the war is waged against “the evil” whose goal is to annihilate us, which is why there are no economic, political or moral limits to our use of violence. An overall rearmament and militarization of our societies appear as a rational choice; the state of exception has been completely normalized. Briefly, war that was once understood as “a continuation of politics with other means” has become now “ontological” while the real existential threat to humanity as a whole, which global warming undoubtedly is, has become a matter of a desublimated everyday politics. How to understand this fatal displacement?
Boris Buden is a writer and cultural theorist based in Berlin. Born in former Yugoslavia he studied philosophy in Zagreb and received his PhD in cultural theory from Humboldt University in Berlin. Since the beginning of the 1980s Buden has published essays and books on critical and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, politics and contemporary art in Croatian, German and English. He is permanent fellow at The European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies in Vienna, and teaches at various universities in Europe. Recently published is his Transition to Nowhere: Art in History After 1989 (Berlin 2020).