Die Klimakrise, die mit der Gefahr einer irreversiblen Reduktion der Vielfalt des Lebens auf dieser Erde einhergeht, kann als das drängendste ethische Problem unserer Zeit gelten. Mit der Übernutzung von Ökosystemen und dem Unterbrechen evolutionärer Linien greifen wir in einer nie zuvor gekannten Tiefe in die Natur ein. Wir bedrohen damit nicht nur die Möglichkeiten zukünftigen menschlichen Lebens. Was auf dem Spiel zu stehen scheint, ist zunehmend die Möglichkeit des Lebens selbst. Die Beiträge des Heftes gehen der Frage nach, ob und wieweit die aus den Fugen geratenen gesellschaftlichen Naturverhältnisse im Anthropozän neue Formen des Widerstands und zivilen Ungehorsams nötig machen bzw. legitimieren könnten. Ziviler Ungehorsam wird dabei als Möglichkeit der Demokratisierung unserer Naturverhältnisse über den menschlichen Rand hinaus begriffen.
Contents:
Andreas Hetzel
Abhandlungen:
Jürgen Manemann
Abstract Starting point of the debate on civil disobedience in the Federal Republic of Germany was the year 1983, when Jürgen Habermas delivered a much-noticed lecture which is still a reference point of many public debates on civil disobedience today. However, the understanding of civil disobedience as political action, which Hannah Arendt developed 50 years ago in a lecture in New York, is more compatible with current debates on political resistance by climate activists.
Buy article Claire Moulin-Doos
Abstract This article analyzes the potential of illegal protests to initiate political changes in the Anthropocene. The current crisis is more than just a climate crisis; we are facing the fundamental challenge to shape collective life on earth, which poses questions of inequalities and migration. Planet earth and non-human beings become political actors, which leads to abandoning the modern dichotomy of subject and object. A raising awareness of the power of the many encourages new emerging political collectives. The hegemonic liberal discourse is questioned for new democratic projects (e.g. in the form of political and economic de-globalization) to be initiated with a sense of our terrestrial condition.
Buy article Fiona Schrading
Abstract Does the future have a future in the Anthropocene? What can it mean to worry about a »common future« or a »future of the common« in the strangely »futureless« epoch of the Anthropocene, when time itself seems to be out of joint? This essay assumes that the ethical-political commitment in the Anthropocene consists precisely in questioning the »future« as an anthropocentric attractor of the »Global West«, in de-colonizing and de-humanizing it. In order to be able to respond to the »catastrophic times« of the Anthropocene, we are called upon not to remain in the problematic alternative between clinging to the »future« as a progressive promise of modernization and a hopeless »futurelessness«, but rather to ask for a possible transformation of the onto-epistemology of the future itself. How are resistant performances of futurity possible that disrupt and thwart the »future« as a violent and excluding onto-epistemological machine of modernity? And how can common practices of futurity be grasped that are not directed towards the development of a »common future«?
Buy article Mareike Kajewski
Abstract The article points out how the social and ecological dimension of climate change are related to each other and both caused by man. A reconstruction of Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis of »alienation from the world« elucidates man’s modern attitude towards other human beings and nature. Judith Butler’s concept of plural performativity is used to show how and why worldwide current global protests become politically effective and aim to change the living conditions of all, so that climate change is once again seen as something that is politically negotiable because it is man-made. This can fundamentally change the conditions and perception of political and collective action.
Buy article Lou Marin
Abstract Drawing on the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, M. K. Gandhi is often criticized today as an alleged racist and defender of the caste system. This debate obscures the radicality of Gandhi’s concept of civil disobedience. It is used as an attempt to delegitimize Gandhi as a possible reference for contemporary statements and struggles against wars, neocolonial exploitation and the destruction of the biosphere. The first part of this text is dedicated to refute these accusations and to restore the legitimacy of Gandhi as a reference for emancipative social movements and an inspiration to learn from his mass campaigns. The second part describes in detail Gandhi’s concept of a »revolutionary civil disobedience«. It is shown that this concept is based on an anarchist and anti-capitalist vision of a free society. That is why Gandhi’s radicality differs from a reformist interpretation of civil disobedience.
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Essay:
Josef H. Reichholf
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