Standard session (discussion following 4 presentations)

1. The Awesome Life: Why Degrowthers Need to Talk about the Feeling of Entropy - video
   Critical views of consumerism are widely shared among degrowthers. However, there is a risk of overlooking a particular affective dimension of consumption: the ‘entropic feeling’. The latter is triggered when we surpass the biophysical limits of our human body and come to enjoy the pleasures of dense energy, e.g. when we drive cars or drink coffee. Taking a critical and re-constructive stance towards what we call the ‘awesome life’ might increase the affective and strategic capacity of degrowth.
   Presenters: Michael Deflorian, Karoline Kalke


2. Connecting degrowth to Epicurean hedonism: pleasure as a political ethics of limits - video
   The session will explore the relations between Epicurean hedonism and degrowth, showing how such connection has the potential to enrich and refine degrowth transformative proposal of a frugal society based on shared simple pleasures, relational goods and friendship, leisure, idleness and dépense.
   Presenters: Roberto Sciarelli


3. Cosmologies of Growth and Degrowth
   Growth cannot be unseated as a paramount goal without wrestling with its cosmological foundations, the way that fantasies of continuous expansion are woven into the narratives and myths that organize modern life. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in India, I sketch an alternative cosmology of degrowth, one that roots the possibility of a livable future in the truth of impermanence. Decay is an essential principle of ecological livelihood, a way to cultivate awareness of our human finitude.
   Presenters: Anand Pandian


4. Dépense as a degrowth strategy - video
   This presentation will discuss the usefulness of both the concept and the practice of dépense for the degrowth project, and will make suggestions on how to frame proposals based on it for the purposes of informing a transition to a degrowth society.
   Presenters: Oxana Lopatina

Language: English with translation to German

Technical details: Standard A5_Limits, Ethics, Unsustainability and Change_trimmed.mp4, MPEG-4 video, 441.7MB

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