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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2020
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.
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.
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.”
2 Latour, Bruno, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy [1999], trans. Porter, Catherine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).Google Scholar
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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.
10 Ibid, 14.
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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.
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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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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.
28 Crutzen, Paul J. and Stoermer, Eugene F., “The ‘Anthropocene,’” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18Google Scholar. On the resonance of this concept and its implications, see Bonneuil, Christophe and Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us [2013], trans. Fernbach, David (London: Verso, 2016)Google Scholar; Grinevald, Jacques and Hamilton, Clive, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?” The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 59–72Google Scholar; Steffen, Willet al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 81–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Charbonnier, Pierre, “L’ambition démocratique à l’âge de l’Anthropocène,” Esprit 12 (2015): 34–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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30 Ibid.
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34 Latour, Facing Gaia, 140.
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45 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 210–11, n. 6.
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This is a translation of: L’écologie politique et la politique moderne*