Obscence

Dirty, shameful, perverted, pornographic, disgusting. Violations of morals, if morality can at all be felt. Usually in relation to genitalia or unseemly demands to copulate. Therefore, it’s somewhat obscene, when oil and trash flow into the sea, mountaintops are removed, and fertilizer becomes poison or seeds become objects of speculation. How obscene are the expansion and transgression in the competition of the market and nationalism. Eat or get eaten: Money rules the world. God is dead. That sounds wild and as shameless as witnessing the unification of human being and technology, speculating on the stock market, or thinking up figures like Frankenstein and the Terminator. Ah, monstrous potential of science, the market, and politics, inventing creatures and violating limits of morality. Speaking of morality, is it all just about limits of strain? Are we not aware that after war the injuries remain, causing trauma? What is the appropriate therapy? How parochial does the whole thing seem from outer space, horizons, and limits are so irrelevant. The obscene is lost with distance. Things come to rest. The only ones affected are those who are too close, and unable to act. Welcome to the age of the obscene!

More information in the media section

Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Keynote by Elizabeth A. Povinelli

The Anthropocene: Where on Earth Are We Going? Keynote by Will Steffen

Is the Anthropocene.... Beautiful? Dialogue with Emma Marris and Erle Ellis

Is the Anthropocene… Legal? Dialogue between Christina von Braun and Paulo Tavares