Geocidal Ethics

​What might ethics become if it were no longer organised around the flourishing or futurity of the human?

​The Institute for Contemporary Critical Thought is pleased to invite you to join us for a seminar and discussion with Joe Gerlach, on his forthcoming book Geocidal Ethics (Nebraska University Press, 2027).

​What might ethics become if it were no longer organised around the flourishing or futurity of the human? In this seminar, we will discuss Joe Gerlach's provocation of geocidal ethics: a speculative ethics adequate to an earth indifferent to Anthropos. Rather than treating geocide as planetary destruction, Gerlach reworks its constituent terms, geo, -cide and ethics, to ask what it might mean to fall away from the human as the privileged horizon of ethical thought. Drawing on Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, Lucretius and Thomas Nail, the chapter we'll discuss approaches geo as movement, dissipation and an ongoing shock to thought. Against the consolations of stewardship and survival, geocidal ethics experiments, therefore, with an ethics of ungrounding, one attentive to death, despair, expenditure and undoing without converting them into apocalyptic conceits. The wager is that ethics need not terminate with the human, and that geography might begin to think and fabulate a futurity it neither owns nor survives.

​Pre-readings to stimulate reflection and discussion for the session will be forwarded to those who register.

​Joe Gerlach is a professor of cultural geography at the University of Bristol. He is author of Spinoza’s Geographical Ethics (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) and associate editor of the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

​The event is FREE, but we will be grateful for your support through a regular or one off donation. Hence the pay-what-you-can system of ticketing: Any amount you can donate will help us continue creating a space where critical thought and collective inquiry are open and accessible. If you're unable to make a donation at this time, please feel free to write "0" on the amount.