Oxana Timofeeva in conversation with Joris Janssens: Solidarity on the Planetary Scale

A critical engagement of theory and arts in a dialogue with natural and technical sciences is characteristic for the materialist turn in contemporary culture. It rethinks historical processes from the perspective of the posthuman turn: the history of humans has to be inscribed into the history of things and the history of the World – into the history of the Earth. Nonhuman forms of living and nonliving matter are included into the historical process, which has to be conceived not as a succession of stages of development of human societies, but as geological eras, whose definition is now a subject of debate. This brings us to a new understanding of politics. It must be not only international, but interspecies, including all subjects and matters – animals, plants, mountains, people, sounds, viruses, AI, etc. These cultural shifts transform traditional modes of the political – republic, democracy, socialism, communism, etc. Oxana Timofeeva will discuss a few concepts that can accompany this transformation, as well as the crucial role of contemporary art in reinventing these concepts.

Oxana Timofeeva is a Professor at the Department of Sociology and Philosophy at the European University in St. Petersburg, member of the artistic collective "Chto Delat?" ("What is to be done?"), a deputy editor of the journal "Stasis", and the author of books History of Animals (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck, 2012; Moscow, 2017; London: Bloomsbury, 2018), and Introduction to the “Erotic Philosophy” of Georges Bataille (Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2009).