June 16, 2025, 5 p.m. University of Arts Linz, Lecture Hall C, Hauptplatz 6
Guest lecture by Christian Dries, in the Department of Cultural Studies, as part of the semester focus on the nuclear age.
Living in the Anthropocene requires strong nerves: war and displacement, neo-fascism, climate change, species extinction, nuclear threats - the list of current catastrophes that add up to a global polycrisis is endless. This situation is also challenging for philosophy and other humanities and cultural studies disciplines. How can they understand the home-made apocalypses of modernity, the new, crisis-ridden age of the Anthropocene?
One possible starting point is the philosopher, cultural critic and essayist Günther Anders, né Stern (1902-1992), whose entire thinking revolves around the apocalyptic tendencies of modernity - around Auschwitz, Hiroshima and other technologically induced forms of man-made mass destruction. According to him, the usual methods of the humanities are no longer sufficient to adequately grasp these 'phenomena'. Since his student days, he had been searching for forms of thinking and writing that would do justice to the current and, in particular, the monstrous developments and tendencies of his own present, that would not only bring what he called the "monstrous" to the conceptual level, but also convey it on the level of affects and feelings. It was no coincidence that he drew on the reservoir of avant-garde art of his time: Dadaism and Surrealism, Brecht's theater and the painter George Grosz. During his time in exile in the USA in the 1940s, he also wrote a typescript, unpublished to this day, which gives Günther Anders' thinking its name: "Occasional Philosophy".
The lecture reconstructs the elements and origins of this specific philosophical method inspired by art and literature and attempts to show to what extent it can still - or even more so now - be a key to the Anthropocene.
Sociologist Christian Dries is chairman of the International Günther Anders Society and has headed the newly established Günther Anders Research Center at the University of Freiburg since summer 2023.