Skip to content
2026
Season 3 Episode 3 of the MLE Podcast
“Hope is a Stance”: Ecology, Aesthetics, and Pluralities of Reason with Dr Kilian Jörg
To be released on Thursday 29th January!
Hosted by Dr Johanna Magin. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Deezer and Acast.
What if we began to think of reason as plural, reasons or reasonings, rather than the monolithic Reason from on high? What would it be like to think with all five senses, going beyond our habitual ocularcentrism? What if affect were both disruptor and the source of our greatest inflexibility? What role does ritual have in metabolizing the whole spectrum of human affect, both individually and collectively? What relationship holds between beauty and ethics in times such as these? What can art, philosophy, and activism learn from one another? How can we create alliances across sociological divides that keep theorists and activists separate? Finally, how can we create more plausible scenarios of hope for a greater number of people?
This conversation was possibly the most wide-ranging I’ve had so far on the podcast. As you’ll hear, Dr Kilian Jörg is a capacious and audacious thinker, and has reflected long and hard on some of modernity’s most recalcitrant and most insidious problems: problems ranging from the climate crisis to the loss of ritual, from polarization to ‘the hope gap.’ But they don’t just do the hard thinking; they are also engaging with these problems from the ground up, reaching across sociological divides that may seem unbridgeable to many. A kaleidoscopic thinker, Kilian is as fluent in the realm of philosophy — drawing from Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, and Michel Serres — as they are in the world of art and ecological justice, inspired by the likes of Timothy Morton and Elin Kelsey. All in all, this conversation was a masterclass in what it means to refuse the dualisms between thinking and acting, between theory and activism, and to invoke the possibility of pluralism in the face of pure criticality.
Dr Kilian Jörg works both artistically and philosophically on the topic of ecological catastrophe and how its transformative forces can best be imagined and deployed. Previous publications have covered themes as wide ranging as club culture, the political backlash from an ecological perspective, cultivating distance in catastrophic times, and a speculative religion of waste. Their current research topics are the car as a metaphor for our toxic entanglements with modern lifestyles (released in book form as “Das Auto und die ökologische Katastrophe” in 2024), the socio-psychological effects of living with ecocide and radical activist strategies of reclaiming land like the ZAD in France (published as "Durchlöchert den Status Quo!" in 2025). Kilian is working both in theory as well as artistic and activist practice on how to create rituals that enable us to cultivate more complex feelings in times of collapse. They currently teach at the School of Transformation at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the program Plastic and Environment at the Art University of Linz. Furthermore, they are affiliated with various collectives, among which the Futurama.Lab, Stoffwechsel - Ecologies of Collaboration, and the CRC Affective Societies at the FU Berlin.
Johanna Magin is MLE's Community and Programs Manager. Originally American and based in Paris, Johanna holds a PhD in French literature from Columbia University (New York) and a BA in French from the University of Chicago. Her research has focused on the medico-philosophical practices of several early-modern French authors in an attempt to understand the relationship between mind and body, and more broadly between science and spirituality, in that time period. Always keen to understand mind-body processes from an experiential perspective, she has also practiced Buddhism intensively since 2008 (Zen and Dzogchen), practiced improvisational dance and theatre since 2009, and is currently training to become a Rosen Method bodywork therapist. Before joining MLE, she worked as an academic program manager and adjunct faculty member at Sciences Po in France, where she taught on a wide number of subjects, from philosophy as a way of life to the politics of poetry.
29-01-2026 08:00 PM