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Political Ecology and Modern Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2020

Bruno Karsenti
Bruno Karsenti*
Affiliation:
EHESS, LIER
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Abstract

The increasingly pressing need to politicize ecology depends on our capacity to conduct a critique of modern politics, reexamining its fundamental concepts and its history. This thesis, developed in Bruno Latour’s most recent book, Facing Gaia, raises the question of what kind of critique is best adapted to this end. This article seeks to address this question by tracing the arguments of Facing Gaia and its recomposition of the relations between science, politics, and religion. These relations, which are constitutive of the experience of modernity, appear differently depending on the conception of collectives that one emphasizes and how one understands their anchoring in their environment. Unlike Latour, this essay argues that it is within the framework of modern societies, understood as an entirely new kind of collective whose history has been distorted and ignored by modernist ideology, that a conception of a specifically ecological justice must be formulated. The critique that is necessary to the politicization of ecology implies a new way of determining the actors involved in the environmental crisis, breaking the particular ties that modernity has forged between societies, the forms of self-awareness they produce as they develop, and the expectations of justice that result from them.

Type
The Anthropocene
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 72 , Issue 2 , June 2017 , pp. 247 - 272
Copyright
© Éditions EHESS 2019

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Footnotes

This article was translated from the French by Amy Jacobs-Colas and edited by Chloe Morgan and Stephen Sawyer.

*

Warm thanks to Antoine Lilti and Gildas Salmon for their readings and wise remarks.

References

1 See the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 2015, https://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/cop21/eng/l09r01.pdf, particularly article 4, § 4 of the Paris Agreement: “Developing country Parties should continue enhancing their mitigation efforts, and are encouraged to move over time towards economy-wide emission reduction or limitation targets in the light of different national circumstances.”

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8 The Marxist critique subsequently evolved on how to defend the notion of immanent critique and characterize capitalism’s cyclical crises. In the 1960s, when the impoverishment of the working class and the criterion of economic exploitation came to seem less relevant, Marxist critique turned to the political crises involved in legitimating capitalism, producing the figure of late or advanced capitalism. But the model of immanent critique remains the cornerstone of Marxist and post-Marxist analysis; see Habermas, Jürgen, Legitimation Crisis [1973], trans. McCarthy, Thomas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975)Google Scholar.

9 Latour, Facing Gaia, 10–14.

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13 On this point, Latour’s thinking developed through a dialogue with Philippe Descola, and their two projects have fueled each other over the last twenty years; see Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture. In Facing Gaia, Latour once again positions the moderns as naturalists. That move and its effect, which is to anthropologically relativize the meaning of the nature/culture split, constitute political ecology’s first lever of critique.

14 “Lastly, the pacts and covenants, by which the parts of this body politic were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that fiat, or the Let us make Man, pronounced by God in the Creation”; Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651), 1Google Scholar. In this passage, according to Latour, we can detect the founding proposition of modern political philosophy.

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18 Latour, Facing Gaia, “Fifth Lecture: How to Convene the Various Peoples (of Nature)?” 167ff.

19 See in particular Karsenti, Bruno, D’une philosophie à l’autre. Les sciences sociales et la politique des modernes (Paris: Gallimard, 2013)Google Scholar.

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21 Latour, Facing Gaia, 58.

22 This is the substance of Émile Durkheim’s theory of social symbolism, fully developed in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life [1912], trans. Karen Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995). See in particular Durkheim’s assertion that collective representations are constructed through relations with the external, material world, not internally within a collective consciousness conceived as generated by the fusion of individual consciousnesses (231–32).

23 It is important to reexamine Polanyi’s central concepts if we are to adjust to the political challenge of climate change in a way consistent with socialist thinking. On this subject, see recent texts by Pierre Charbonnier, particularly, “Le socialisme est-il une politique de la nature ? Une lecture écologique de Karl Polanyi,” Incidence 11 (2015): 183–204.

24 Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944).Google Scholar

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26 Latour, Facing Gaia, 181–82.

27 The need to resuscitate our historical consciousness in order to politicize ecology is one of Latour’s main and most insistent points; see Facing Gaia, 165, 182, and 195, n. 33.

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30 Ibid.

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33 It is remarkable that in probing the political meaning of his own thinking as he does in Facing Gaia, Latour should return to the classic sociological question of authority as formulated in Durkheimian sociology. At the end of his life’s work, Durkheim defined the cardinal problem of constituting social facts in terms of authority, not constraint or coercion; see The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 210–11, n. 6.

34 Latour, Facing Gaia, 140.

35 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, “Cosmogonies and Myths of Sovereignty,” in The Origins of Greek Thought [1962] (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 102–18Google Scholar; Détienne, Marcel, Apollon, le couteau à la main. Une approche expérimentale du polythéisme grec (1998; repr. Paris: Gallimard, 2009)Google Scholar.

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37 Latour, Facing Gaia, 145.

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