This episode was recorded live during the launch of e-flux journal issue #131 on December 7, 2022. The evening was introduced and moderated by the journal editors, and featured authors Martin Guinard, Sabu Kohso, Matt Peterson, Leon Dische Becker, and Cosmo Bjorkenheim.

Martin Guinard expands on his “Homage to Bruno Latour” with a message on diplomacy between different worlds that are no longer commoning together. In connection to Dische Becker and Bjorkenheim’s later conversation, Guinard also touches on Latour’s (non-)relationship to science fiction.

Sabu Kohso and Matt Peterson discuss their conversation “The Catastrophe Revealed: On Radiation and Revolution,” which traces deep, interconnected fault lines between the ongoing aftermaths of the Fukushima disaster and the Covid pandemic, as well as the imperial and also liberatory history of activist movements in Tokyo, New York, and all places where people rise up against a disintegrating world.

Leon Dische Becker and Cosmo Bjorkenheim discuss their essay “A Cursed Franchise: Reliving Colonial Nightmares Through Endless Sci-fi Remakes,” which, among other things, recommends against Hollywood directors mounting a fourth remake of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, arguing that its curses and racist colonial critiques are better left in the past.