Kilian Jörg, Alexis Shotwell
The Political Potential of Spontaneous Delight in Other People’s Good Fortune
The contemporary world is so difficult; anywhere we look,
people are suffering. Under the conditions in which we all
live, where everyone needs money to pay for the most basic
conditions of their lives, people’s material and affective
landscapes are shaped by a certain imperative of selfprotective
isolation. Scarcity is not only a political myth
justifying the idea that everyone should selfishly guard their
own (emotional and practical) resources; it is an orientation
animating much of conventional society. Cultivating loving kindness
(maitrī) is one compelling technology for reorienting
ourselves to behave otherwise. But especially
under contemporary conditions, it is essential to bring into
any conversation about kindness a consideration of the
third of the Buddhist’s ‘immeasurables’: rejoicing (muditā),
spontaneous joy in others’ good fortune.
In this talk, we suggest fruitful synergies between this
affective technology and specific strands in Western
philosophy. Starting from a post-Kantian commitment to
non-ideal ethical praxis, we engage a much earlier form of
moral philosophy as shaping our mores, or ways of being
together. We suggest that shaping collective practices of
mutual flourishing benefits from reformulating our
understanding of interpersonal ethical engagement, reading
muditā as a generative and anti-capitalist feeling.
Kilian Jörg works artistically and philosophically on how the
transformative forces of ecological catastrophe can best be
imagined and deployed. Previous focal topics include club
culture; the political backlash from an ecological
perspective; cultivating distance in catastrophic times; and a
speculative religion of waste. Current work considers the
car as a metaphor for our toxic lifestyle entanglements (Das
Auto und die ökologische Katastrophe, 2024); the sociopsychological
effects of living with ecocide; radical activist
strategies of reclaiming land like the ZAD in France
(Durchlöchert den Status Quo, 2025); and creating rituals that
enable us to cultivate more complex feelings in time of
collapse. They 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, and are
affiliated to various collectives, including the Futurama.Lab,
Stoffwechsel—Ecologies of Collaboration and the CRC
Affective Societies at the FU Berlin.
Alexis Shotwell is Professor in Sociology & Anthropology
and in Philosophy at Carleton University, on unceded
Algonquin land. She works on complexity, complicity, and
collective transformation. Shotwell’s current projects
investigate how we might understand, bear witness, and
respond to unjust histories and complex presents with an
eye toward creating different futures. She is the coinvestigator
for the AIDS Activist History Project
(aidsactivisthistory.ca), and the author of Knowing Otherwise:
Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding (2011); Against Purity:
Living Ethically in Compromised Times (2016); and Only With
Others (forthcoming).