2022-23 Speaker Series

November 15, 2022
1:00 p.m. EST

Kirill Chepurin

Fellow at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Hamburg

“Cross-Scalar Romanticism” 

The question of scale has recently come to the fore in discussions of the Anthropocene and the planetary—but the genealogy of this question is entangled with the trajectory of post-Copernican modernity as a whole. In this talk, I turn to the eighteenth century as the last great age of cross-scalar thinking, and to early Romanticism as its last great exemplification. The Romantic project of universal poiesis seeks to think across and conceptually unify three disparate temporal and spatial scales: the history of humanity across the globe; the geo-cosmic history of the planet Earth; and the broader processuality of the universe. In the wake of the Copernican Revolution, these scales increasingly drift apart and cease to cohere, which engenders the central questions that resonate between Romanticism and the present moment of crisis: What does it mean to think across scales, and what is at stake in cross-scalar thinking? How to inhabit immanently the contingency and incoherence of reality without seeking to control it, and without seeking to legitimate the exclusions and violences of the global on a planetary and cosmic scale?

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