Seminars

Ecological critics of capital usually argue that a finite planet is incompatible with infinite capitalist growth. But what happens to this critique once ecological limits and thresholds have been crossed without neither capitalism nor the world simply ending? The talk proposes a new ecological critique of capital beyond ecological finitude and capitalist infinitude; a critique that stresses the haunting, recurring, and indebting qualities of capital as a planetary force. It will argue that capital’s return is bound to return as ecological destruction. Global heating is the eternal return of capitalist return as collective ecological debt. With reference to projects to remove carbon from the atmosphere, the talk shows a) how in times of carbon overshoot what environmental economists call “natural capital” turns from asset into liability, and b) that carbon removal is not, as it is often cast, a return to the climatic status quo ante. Instead, it inaugurates an open-ended, potentially infinite project of planetary repair without redemption and return.

The principle of ecosovereignty that I advocate in my 2025 book of that title involves multiple justifications. In this talk, I focus on one of these—that it is the best current understanding of the concept of political sovereignty. 3 points are emphasized. 1st, sovereignty is not necessarily a concept that must be associated with absolute state authority, as in the influential early modern conception of Bodin and Hobbes. 2nd, sovereignty today, as a result of colonial liberation movements in the 20th century, is to be understood not as opposed to the principle of self-determination, but as an entailment of that principle. 3rd, self-determination itself must be rethought, after the “environmental turn” in political philosophy, as a principle justifying local and substate authority over environmental goods and services. These 3 points culminate in the principle of ecosovereignty, or so I will argue.

Akeel Bilgrami’s paper will seek to explore a role for economic rights in the context of an analysis of capitalist political economy in the neoliberal period, while also trying to diagnose the relative lack of foundational philosophical discussion of such rights when compared to the centuries of profound attempts to lay foundations for the rights around liberty.