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Decentering the Human? Gaia, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values
Short Title: Decentering the Human?
Format: Audiovisual
Publication Year: Submitted
Sources ID: 80271
Visibility: Public (group default)
Abstract: (Show)
Dipesh Chakrabarty is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Law at the University of Chicago. His lecture “Decentering the Human? Gaia” was given on February 19, 2015, as part of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale. This second of two lectures extends Chakrabarty’s exploration of the tension between human (homo) and life (zoe)-centric perspectives on climate change. Tracing some of the “moods” in which we respond to climate change (skepticism, anger, denial), he argues that these are the symptoms of a homocentric view of environmental crisis. With a zoe-centric perspective on climate change, these moods need no longer constrict our access to the crisis. In the zoe-centric view, he argues, the subject that emerges is dispersed among plants, animals, humans, and other beings and objects. The task then is to figure out how to compose a politics for such a subject, a project that Chakrabarty contends is relevant to his initial discussion of how we might “compose the common” in our sense of “common but differentiated” responsibilities for climate change.