Registration ends on 12.10.2026 at 23:59.

The promises of the European Enlightenment—autonomy, freedom, and equality—are historically intertwined with the rise of fossil capitalism. Autonomy was frequently understood as liberation from natural constraints, freedom as unrestricted mobility, and equality as participation in growing consumption. The material prerequisite for this was the extraction and combustion of immense quantities of fossil energy—coal, oil, and gas—within a short period of time. The first goal of this seminar is to critically discuss this connection through foundational texts, tentatively including works by Timothy Mitchell, Pierre Charbonnier, Andreas Malm, and Daniela Russ.

With the onset of the climate crisis, this fossil order—and with it the traditional understanding of Enlightenment values—has come under severe pressure. At the same time, political movements are attempting to defend fossil-based ways of life and notions of freedom against ecological limits, often in authoritarian and regressive forms. In a second step, we will analyze these dynamics of defense using theoretical perspectives from the Zetkin Collective, Jacob Blumenfeld, and Cara Daggett.

Finally, the seminar asks how Enlightenment values can be liberated from their fossil-capitalist framework and reconceptualized. A purely technological energy transition (“green capitalism”) that replaces fossil fuels with renewable energy sources without transforming social modes of production and living leads into new dead ends of extractivism (Thea Riofrancos). A viable concept of future emancipation must therefore think energy and the social system together. Against this backdrop, we will discuss approaches toward a solar Enlightenment and an ecological socialism/communism, drawing on works by Oxana Timofeeva, John Bellamy Foster, and Jason W. Moore, among others.

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