Lifetime exhaustion

The ardor of looters, essays of environmental and animal philosophy is a book that completes two preceding works (new ecological fronts and portraits of philosophers in environmentalists) and thus firm, as the author confess, “ A trilogy that we had not conceived as such (…) and which we could even less predict that it would one day experience a point (P. 22). With The ardor of the lootersHicham-Stéphane Afeissa, an essential figure that has helped to publicize ecological discourse in France thanks to these collections of ethics and aesthetic environmental texts, it seems, it seems, to more than ten years devoted to study and reflection in the field of ecological thought. Under the suggestive title of The ardor of the looterstaken fromA season in hell de Rimbaud, H.-S. Afeissa brings together a selection of tests, including five unpublished, divided into four sections: animal philosophy, political ecology, environmental aesthetic and ecosophy.

This work thus covers a certain number of themes relating to philosophy, ethics and the aesthetics of the environment: the domestication of pets ; The killing of animals ; The conditions for a living policy ; the contribution of an apocalyptic perspective in political ecology ; the limits and the value of environmental aesthetics and its moral implications ; The originality of the deep ecology of Arne Næss, its differences in relation to continental ecology and environmental ethics, the debate which it has brought up between deep ecology and the current of ecofeminism ; Or the possibility of an urban ecosophy of phenomenological inspiration.

Pillage economy

In The ardor of the looters, There is no original thesis strictly speaking. This is the choice of a theme that appears here a central proposal and guiding thread of the work: Pillage. Using the term looting, H.-S. Afeissa refers to the economy of looting (Raubwirtschaft) Geographers from the end of XIX^e and the beginning of XX^e century. This notion first designated a stage in the development of a human community which appropriates environmental resources, then it was used to denounce “ destructive occupation By which human beings appropriate the resources of the earth (p. 22) and of which one can find a history in the work of the ecologist Henry Fairfield Osborn The planet with looting (Our Plundered Planet) (1948). For H.-S. Afeissa, looting therefore refers to extractivism as a modality of capitalism defined as “ global company of generalized appropriation of nature and living bodies (P. 23). It is in this notion that H.-S. Afeissa addresses the different themes that are gathered in this book. Sometimes it is mobilized explicitly, sometimes it crosses the themes in watermark. What is important here is that H.-S. Afeissa sees in the looting, like the Vampire capital of Marx, a deadly company, “ a powerful dynamics of exhaustion of life “, As he says admirably (p. 23-24).

In “ Animal distribution », H.-S. Afeissa defends the idea that domestication of pets remains the body of any animal characteristic to make them look like “ to ridiculous creatures »(P. 25 and 29 SQ.). He shows, based on the work of Jocelyne Porcher, that it is the social relationship of work likely to benefit the two partners who always constituted this “ Bilateral socialization process »What is domestication (p. 33-4) ; And it is because this report was distorted, by reducing part of the animal world to the status of pets (p. 47), that the domestication of animals contains a process of unilateral domination which distorts them by taking away from them any animal characteristic (p. 51). This deadly relationship, of life exhaustion, H.-S. Afeissa also finds it in invisible practices of meat production and consumption, practices which, according to the author, are the “ decision “Of a violent relationship to animals (“ The denial of the killing of animals », P. 63-4). By that, H.-S. Afeissa understands the existence of a continuity, of a permanence, fundamental between the sacrificial structure of animals in antiquity and their contemporary death in the slaughterhouse. What makes the link between the two phenomena is the mechanism of denialin the Freudian sense, murder by the ritual in sacrificial practice and by the invisibility of the breeding, slaughter and transformation process in contemporary carnement food, and therefore obscuring the violent relationship to animals (p. 63).

These analyzes could be part of the extension of work in political ecology of philosophers like Paul Guillibert (Exploit the living. A political labor ecology) or Léna Balaud and Antoine Chopot (We are not alone: ​​land uprising policy) on the appropriation and the work of the living resources of the planet. The particularity of the texts of H.-S. Afeissa in relation to this current of political ecology of Marxist inspiration is the ethical, sociological and anthropological perspective that its analyzes bring to the question of our relationships to domestic animals.

Vandalism

At the other extreme of the field of ecological thought, in an essay that intersects ethical and aesthetics of the environment, we find the same theme of looting in the form of vandalism. In “ Ecological vandalism and intrinsic value of nature “, The concept of vandalism is used to morally disqualify the action which has the effect of destroying what has an intrinsic value: the existence of a beautiful world (p. 174-5). The destruction of the marsh landscapes is a good example of this violent relationship with regard to nature. In this beautiful test of applied aesthetics, “ The aesthetics of the marshes », Where environmental and aesthetic history mix, HS. Afeissa shows how these landscapes, long demonized, came to constitute spaces of protection and heritage, as well as places of multiple aesthetic experiences: visual, sound, olfactory, tactile and kinesthesia landscape (p. 235). The marsh landscape can therefore be considered “ The paradigm of aesthetic experience (P. 236).

Ambivalent world, shared between deities and human beings, between the dead and the living combining the top and the underside, the earth and the water, the marshes blur all the borders and the aesthetic categories (p. 238)

The marsh landscape is also an eloquent example of the harmful effects of the ardor of looters. Indeed, centuries of policy of colonization, drying up, suppression and clearing of these spaces testify to ignorance, blindness and contempt for these ecosystems which are among the most fertile and productive on the planet and the most threatened in history (p. 229).

The voracity

We will understand, “ The ardor of the looters “Qualifies this” mode of voracious appropriation of nature »Viewing the accumulation of capital in defiance of nature (p. 23). This collection of essays therefore highlights, through the diversity of the themes addressed, this “ dynamics of exhaustion of life », And in its different forms. One of the forms it takes, in urban areas this time, is the loss of an intuitive world in our relationship to the city by the use of new movement methods such as electric scooters. The phenomenological implications of such a mode of displacement are the cancellation of the body and the movement (walking) as well as the abolition of practical space. “” In such conditions », Writes H.-S. Afeissa, “ There is no longer any pedestrian appropriation of the city or in relation to space through the body (…) (P. 312) ; In other words, there is no constitution of a lived space. Pillage here is the reduction of the world where walking is synonymous with the constitution of the world of life as a place of residential, stay, existence.

The criticism of the voracious mode of appropriation of nature under the figure of the ardor of the looters, and the destruction of our intuitive relationship to the world that it leads to means that the set of texts gathered in this book contributes to effectively elucidate contemporary ecological discourse. Indeed, this is what allows our author for reproaching their posture to certain contemporary figures of ecological thought (Baptiste Morizot, Corine Palluchon, Michaël Fœsel). However, the strength of his critical intuition, well founded, tends to turn into controversy in certain places. This is the case, for example, of the reproach that the author addresses to B. Morizot in “ Of a predator, the other: the wolf, the human and the capitalist ». What H.-S. Afeissa criticizes B. Morizot, it is, on the one hand, to dissociate the question of the management of wildlife (here the wolf) of the relationship that we have with other animals (servants and breeding) (p. 72), and therefore of “ hide »The politico-economic dimension (industrial production and carnivorous consumption) of our relationships to domestic animals (p.75 sq.). Or B. Morizot seeks, in Diplomatsto set up a dialogue device at the interface between human and wild worlds in order to negotiate forms of cohabitation. The political-economic question, although relevant moreover, seems secondary to the initial project which is that of finding forms of coexistence with wild animals.

In this regard, the reproach of our author seems too severe. On the other hand, a mutualist project, such as that of B. Morizot, would have much to gain reflections that H.-S. Afeissa develops on the concept of work (in “ Animal distribution “, For example). As we saw, H.-S. Afeissa defends the idea that the work, and the social relationship he establishes is what defines first of all our relationship to domestic animals (today distorted, as our author rightly underlines). However by relying on the concept of work, we could explain the social-historical creation of theinterface Between human and wild worlds where Mutual dialogue. By drawing inspiration this time from the concept of work according to Hannah Arendt, we could elucidate this relationship between the social and the savage. Indeed, work, for H. Arendt, is the basis of reproduction of the biological process, of life itself, and through this social. If we consider that at this process participate in domestic animals, we have here the appearance of the interface between social world (humans and pets) and wild world where mutual dialogue would then make sense.

The controversial tone that emerges in certain places does not detract from the rigor and the scholarship which cross all of these texts, and especially to the strength of the criticism of the voracious mode of capitalist appropriation. H.-S. Afeissa is right to make it the central perspective of his work, and the criterion in which judges contemporary ecological discourse.