Speaker Series

“Living Calm”—Hölderlin’s Anthropocene Theater, Benjamin Lewis Robinson (NYU)

October 30, 2025, 5:00pm

Hölderlin’s abandoned Empedocles project (1797–1800) can be read today as a contribution to political theater in the Anthropocene. It stages the trouble with action in a climate emergency. The Anthropocene drives home a truth about action on which Hannah Arendt always insisted: “In acting we can really never know what we are doing.” While something must be done, this is because of what has already been, and is still being, done. How to respond to the tragic drama of the Anthropocene without rehearsing it?