The article discusses a recurrent discursive mechanism by which contemporary societies respond to the emergence of a crisis. Faced with the surplus of objectivity produced by a particular crisis – be it the global economic crisis, the refugee crisis, the climate emergency or the recent pandemic – a two-component defence mechanism is formed in discourse, which in turn also assumes a pseudo-objective status. In the first step, after the initial attempt to directly deny the emergence of a crisis is overturned, (...) the crisis is affirmed by a compromise constatation of its existence that underscores the supposedly central insight that the crisis has brought; in the second step, the constatation is supplemented by a pseudo-objective rule of action. In the case of the current pandemic, discussed in detail in the third section of the article, the rule of action has been formed as a political generalisation of the principle of proportionality. Since it is not applicable to the basic dynamic principles of the pandemic and consequently cannot solve the crisis, it has been gradually reduced to a minimum: we must learn to live with the virus. (shrink)

The article discusses the mechanisms of climate change denial. It starts from the observation that habituation to denial is based on a process that is exactly the opposite on the content level: the process of repeated aha-experiences, i.e., sudden insights into reality of the climate crisis. In the first part, the author summarises the developments of recent years, which came to a symbolic end at COP 28 in Dubai, when the President introduced the contradictory idea that the transition to a (...) sustainable paradigm is only possible by simultaneously maintaing the fossil fuel paradigm. In the second part, the article summarises some of the main points of what was probably the first interdisciplinary symposium on climate change, organised in 1975 by Margaret Mead. Referring to the conference’s position paper, the author first develops the basic framework for productive interaction between the social and natural sciences as Mead envisioned it and then presents the social consequences of the fact that the relationship remained institutionally disorganised—and eventually had to organise itself. (shrink)

In the first part of the article, the author analyses the last phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, which he terms “ex-communication”. A characteristic of this phase is not only virus”, but also the irrevocable transition to “living with the virus” but also the retroactive erasure of potentially valuable lessons from the pandemic for dealing with other crises. After outlining a new legal understanding of climate emergency in the second part of the text, the author concludes by focusing on the global (...) warming debate in the 1970s. In doing so, he posits that we must search for the origin of all forms of “climate delay” (Lamb et al.) in the confluence of two contradictory tendencies during that period: the determination to stop global warming early and the techno-utopian desire to prevent the onset of an ice age by deliberately warming the atmosphere. The irony is that the caution offered as a way out of the contradiction not only failed to mitigate climate change but ultimately prevented the onset of an ice age for the foreseeable future. Such clear signals of the Anthropocene present us with a new choice, i.e. a choice between two versions of the self-evident, two versions of the impossible. (shrink)

The article discusses the structural dynamics of the Covid 19 pandemic and defines it as an essentially finite crisis. However, this definition does not simply come down to the abstract necessity that the pandemic must end at some point, but rather to the fact that the idea of an end has determined the entire course of the pandemic. From the outset, this idea took two antagonistic forms: From the first perspective, the pandemic can only be ended by eliminating the source (...) of the intrusion; from the second perspective, ending the pandemic amounts to society finding a way to adapt to the intrusion. Apart from analyzing the often paradoxical implications of this essentially antagonistic idea for the “objective” evolution of the pandemic in its various phases, the article also demonstrates the inherently sadistic structure of the prevailing societal response. Precisely because this response was aimed at an impossible total normalization, it prepared the ground for the pandemic to possibly mutate into a genuine Anthropocene crisis, the endemic pandemic. (shrink)