Opening of the Conference

Emerging in a global blind spot the consequences of climate change have the potential to unleash a radical capacity for transformation breaking through history, blowing across boundaries, ripping through political sytsems and cultural roots. Political philosopher Carl Schmitt, making the distinction between  'the real enemy' and 'the absolute enemy' hints at the possibility of enacting cultural techniques in confronting the massive scale of the threats we are facing. If climate change represents the 'absolute enemy' of our age, where new realities are born out of revolutions, not out of easy transitions, what are dynamics we can seize upon to reconfigure the biological, cultural and technological system called earth?