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Radboud University Press

Climate Change as an Existential Threat: Environmental Politics in the Shadow of Nihilism

  • Johanna Oksala (author)
Chapter of: Purple Brains: Feminisms at the Limits of Philosophy

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Metadata
TitleClimate Change as an Existential Threat: Environmental Politics in the Shadow of Nihilism
ContributorJohanna Oksala (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.54195/HSOV8373_CH18
Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
PublisherRadboud University Press
Published on2024-05-16
Long abstractJohanna Oksala, in her contribution, “Climate Change as an Existential Threat: Environmental Politics in the Shadow of Nihilism,” argues that climate change is not only a political problem in the obvious sense that it cannot be solved without profound transformations in political and economic practices and forms of global governance, but also a political problem in a deeper, existential, and ontological sense: responding to the climate crisis adequately requires a politics that is able to confront and work through the nihilism that this crisis generates. Oksala suggests that Veronica Vasterling’s reading of Arendt brings to the fore the specific meaning of “politics” at hand here. Considered through an Arendtian lens, climate change is a political problem in the sense that it fundamentally threatens current modes of life, and thus calls for the creation of new meanings which can sustain our world. Hence, environmental politics should not be reduced to pragmatic problem-solving; it should be understood as an existential project of safeguarding the stability and dignity of the common world.
Keywords
  • feminist theory
  • feminist philosophy
  • gender theory
  • race
  • racism
  • sexism and misogyny
  • oppresssion and resistance
  • the environment
  • climate change
  • neuropsychology
  • brain theories
Contributors

Johanna Oksala

(author)

Johanna Oksala is Arthur J. Schmitt Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. Her areas of expertise are political philosophy, feminist philosophy, environmental philosophy, Foucault, and phenomenology. Her books include Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge UP 2005), How to Read Foucault (Granta Books 2007), Foucault, Politics, and Violence (Northwestern UP 2012), Political Philosophy: All That Matters (Hodder and Stoughton 2013), Feminist Experiences (Northwestern UP 2016) and Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology (Northwestern UP 2023).