Roundtable "Forces of History" with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Alyssa Battistoni, Massimiliano Tomba, Lillian Cicerchia, Maeve Cooke, Rahel Jaeggi and Robin Celikates

What does Marx’s famous statement in the opening pages of ^{*The Eighteenth}Brumaire* —that “human beings make their own history”—mean today, in light of planetary limits and looming ecological catastrophes? The public roundtable at this year’s International Critical Theory Summer School offers an opportunity to discuss different approaches to history and historical agency from a materialist perspective. The discussion will focus on ecological and other non-human forces in history and ask: What consequences do they have for our understanding of history and emancipation? Does recognizing non-human forces as historical agents entail a fragmentation of history into a plurality of histories? And how does a planetary reframing of history affect the relationship between subaltern histories and the idea of universal history?