BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:The Disjointed Temporality of Climate Change - Karen Pinkus\, USC
DTSTART:20080519T160000Z
DTEND:20080519T173000Z
UID:TALK11772@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Benjamin Morris
DESCRIPTION:The Cultures of Climate Change at CRASSH announces its third e
 vent of Easter Term\, a lecture by Karen Pinkus entitled "The Disjointed T
 emporality of Climate Change." This lecture will be followed by discussion
  and a wine reception.\n\nAbstract:\nThis talk puts forward the idea that 
 discourse around climate change in the public sphere is focused on decadal
  timescales for change and on the automobile. I use thinkers like Heidegge
 r\, Derrida\, Stiegler and Agamben to undo the sort of certainty that we h
 ear in the public realm about the individual consumer or "stakeholder" bei
 ng able to make behavioral changes that will result in significant greenho
 use gas reductions within decades. Instead\, I argue that both the obsessi
 ve focus on the auto and the focus on greentech as consumer product deflec
 t our attention from what is a true incommensurability between the timesca
 le of fossil fuels and "human" time. It is only by "thinking otherwise" --
  beyond the consumer\, beyond the time of common sense -- that we could be
 gin to address climate change in a meaningful way. In short\, literary the
 ory proves extremely useful in helping to think about these issues\, preci
 sely because it undoes a kind of commonsense certainty that we find in the
  public sphere -- such as in Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth.\n\nKar
 en Pinkus is Professor of French and Italian and Comparative Literature at
  USC. She is currently working on the role of the humanities\, and specifi
 cally literary theory\, in confronting climate change. She argues that the
  humanities are crucial to the most basic thinking about what it might mea
 n to "solve" the problems of greenhouse gas emissions.
LOCATION:CRASSH Seminar Room\, 17 Mill Lane
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR