We do not want to see our waste, we barely want to think about it, but they have a lot to say to us: on our ways, on our lives and more about what we do today in our world.
If it is a life of ideas, it is paradoxically in the world of waste, rejects, trash and filth, that it is most immediately seen at work. Because it is on them that our subjects and our ways of making world depend. So sometimes we will think, in a rather idealistic tradition, that waste there is nothing to say, and surely not or even less what to make a philosophy. Sometimes, without being materialistic, but at the very least materialologist, we will oppose that it is important to rematerialize, to the tests of the trials of the world, and that at this end, the waste, the detritus, the abject give to think, to live and even to philosophize. It is, for a part, in this vein that the work settles Waste philosophyby Claire Larroque. It has settled there since the ecological dimension of a philosophy of living environments, since from now on the pupil could well be another name for the anthropocene. Indeed, did our waste have not become world objects, a rejected rejected here that can be impacting there thousands of kilometers there ? More our waste, not only are exchanged at the global level, but have gained the magnitude of a sixth continent with our plastics gathered in the heart of the ocean. Is it not urgent then to think about waste when the latter, mirror disturbance of anthropization, is the massive certificate of an experience of delightful human living from their circles ? The latter keep being envisaged either as careers where to extract materials, or as landscapes from which to draw pleasures, or as dumps, often retraining of the first. They rarely be as a partner. It has therefore become necessary to wonder not only where our waste goes in our technological civilization, not only what to do with them, but what to do with them, thinking and living our being in being under the sign of the finish. It is to answer these questions that the philosopher is working.
Waste, a material good to think ?
Indeed, the company is necessary. If the verbs “ throw ” Or “ rebuild “Seem to keep a semblance of appearance between the time of Socrates and ours, we do not throw a radioactive waste as we get rid of an amphora ; We do not put a toxic or electronic waste to the rebate as we abandon an old tank wheel on the dumping ground. If an said Socratic has been able to resonate and reverberate for thousands of years in the curious and worried memory of humans, it is now our waste which, in the long run, punctuate their very long time. They link present and future generations more immediately than an inspired word. No doubt we are all a little Platonician so much, even more than the matter deemed inconsistent for thought, detrital matter seems to us to aim for the inform, the corruption of the form making the whole other of thought. Plato, in the Parmenid Did he not say to wanting to think of the hair, mud, dirt, garbage … A whole filth and essence, we risk sinking into a “ niaiseries “(Parmenid 130C.) ? The waste would call less the road to reflection than the rout of thought, confronting the unthinkable of what dissolves in the inform. But in a start of attention to the terrestrial, we can refuse this slippery slope which, between shape and informs, installs the waste on the race of its forfeiture. Following Canguilhem, we can in contrast Attest that in philosophy there are no foreign materials. That all material is a good material to think. This is what François Dagognet, in a Canguilhemian spirit, sought to do, turning less into a materialist than in a materialologist curious about the abundant multiplicity of the worlds of the detritus, the waste, the abject. The company that the philosopher Claire Larroque leads here to build a philosophy of waste recognizes this lineage and opts for a “ bias »Said Francis Ponge. She works, for this, to clear the language of misleading metaphors, to pluralize the language of the garbage. It dismantles the symbolism of the fall which places the waste under the category of what choks, collapses, dilutes in the inform ; And offers other symbolisms to him. There is that of the cycle in recycling and recycling. There is that of the link, in the awareness of affiliations, in the organic model which makes waste the moment of a process linked to the reproduction of life from which it cannot be detached (p. 357). Waste is also a common finding in the composting of organic matter its paradigm (from domestic backroot to urban reterritorializations of kitchen waste). It is to slow down the fall of waste in forfeiture, in order to make it the opportunity to revisit our links, that the book is working.
Social construction of the rebate
Philosophers are not the first to be interested in waste, in their double symbolic dimension (the cultural imagination of contamination, of the task, which Ricœur identified as symbolic of defilement) and material (from organic waste to the proliferation of industrial waste to the ultimate residues). We must recognize the role played by the social sciences (anthropology, ethnology, history, sociology) to see in the waste not of the inhuman, but of the very human. We must remember the famous words of Marcel Mauss declaring that “ What is most important to study in a society are the heaps of garbage »» ; idea that he extended by specifying “ : We must not fear to collect things even the most humble and most despised (…) by searching a pile of garbage, we can reconstruct the whole life of a society … ». We can with the social sciences – the work little studies the contributions of psychoanalysis on the relationship to affects and morbid impulses engaged in our relations to the broken, to the chipped, to the mold, to the rot – to work to philosophize. It is thus possible to build a symbolic philosophy, bringing to light that the imaginary of the defilement reveals “ a social construction of disgust “ (p. 94) which can, therefore, be discussed, worked and redirected. Furthermore, it is a question of reinstalling it in a philosophy of techniques questioning the waste treatment industry, engineering and the economy of the informal or formal market of waste via the large sorting machine.
The philosophy of sciences and techniques allows us to get our waste out of magma informs, indistinct and confused where the word “ rebate “Locked them up. She invites us to get out of the managerial system that thinks waste from downstream as the end of a cycle still driving on the ultimate waste to expel. It prepares a more attentive culture for maintenance, maintenance, repair in daily attention paid to “ things Sociologists David Pontille and Jérôme Denis say sociologists. Modifying our attitude in the face of waste requires recognizing that the breakdown is specific to the world of artifacts rather that it would point out a failure as suggested by the abstract technical ideology of the smooth which praises the merits of the new, the consumable and rejects to the rebut. It is a question of finding them as very human rather than incredible. It is indeed the extractivist and productivist culture, cantor of the irreparable and the disposable, that it is then a question of contesting:
By rearning ourselves to technical objects by fine attention to their specific functioning … (are) questioned our systematic rebate behaviors, induced by the consumer production system which manufactures standardized objects, decontextualized whose qualifications (‘disposable’, ‘for single use’ …) generate standards of individualist behavior, mobile, little attentive to the environments, rejection and abandonment (p. 407).
But this philosophy of techniques for Claire Larroque must also be prolonged in an ethics and a waste policy both on the latter are concentrated on the challenges of environmental injustices and social injustices. The choice of waste revaluation techniques mobilizes ethical and political options, such as it can only be considered as a technical question. How is you collectively dressed up, in these moments of ecological transition, by waste management systems ? Talking about it in terms of management is depoliticizing them by pretending to administer them. Managing is depoliticizing, impoverishing gestures and vernacular sorting ; It is invisible the planetary trajectories of the scraps, and erase, having moved environmental and social injustices. Who lives next to our garbage ? It is enough to collectively wonder where our waste is going-which most of the time we ignore-to discover that the question of globalized waste includes relationships of domination, neo-colonization. The richest populations and countries discharge, the word is the good, on the poorest countries of their responsibilities concerning their plastic, electronic, toxic or radioactive waste. Very beautiful surveys, painful and decisive, in the book of Claire Larroque thus concern more or less legal open discharges, mafia toxic waste sites or decisions of implantation of incineration plants revealing conflicts of uses and political choices, whether in Abidjan, Los Angeles or Naples.
Finally, it is necessary to go to the considerations of an ontology thinking the question of nothing, of nothingness as we go to the deep nucleus of a civilization addressed since his thought of non-being. There is with the waste, in the death of the object, the opportunity to develop mediation on vanities and death. The disgust of waste could be a form of disgust with regard to our own finitude (the corpse which is no longer quite someone, but which is not yet something asks us this question: is it waste like the others ?). How do we think of our annihilation, and more broadly the finitude ? Waste answers this question with a lesson in things ! The illusion of believing is infiniting or tearing in the world – that of believing infinite growth in a finished world ; That of denying the upcoming death – is corrected by the ontological test of waste. It marks our lives of the seal of belonging to what is finished and what ends. This is not the name of a failure, but that of a situation. In this sense, the waste is not filthy, concludes Claire Larroque. He is not “ to reject out of the human world because it threatens the intrasocial symbolic order »» ; “” The filth becomes what destroys … The multitude of living forms … and what destroys all forms of relations with nature (P. 427). The waste is not necessarily on the side of the disgusting ; He also says to himself on the side of what is and makes living and living.
On the waste has deployed the great separation of modern naturalism which to be, separated, dismissed and distant nature and artifice, form and informs it. His culture of order and form rejected contagion as a force by disorder by informing him. Another thought, other practices, in and by consciousness links, suggests that waste is less forfeiture than consciousness, certainly disturbing because not glorious, of our dependencies and our belonging. There is a possible horizon to envisage non -morbid detrital practices, concerned about the world of the living. And if the waste became the possible name of our terrestrial anchors ? Thinking about it on the side of the link rather than nothing can be good.