Every Tuesday, The duty offers a space to the creators of a periodical. This week, we offer you a text published in the magazine Relationshipsfall 2023, no 822.
Still little conceptualized in Quebec, the theory of “collapse”, which is based on the multiplication of social and environmental crises to announce the imminence of a civilizational collapse, has entered political debates and environmentalist circles in Europe in the early 2010s […]. Popularized in France and Belgium by the best-seller How everything can collapse. Small collapsology manual for the use of present generations, by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens (Seuil, 2015; 2021 for the 2e edition), this notion and the imaginary end of the world that it carries quickly imposed themselves in the public and media space, giving rise to clear-cut and often antagonistic positions. […]
Like their critics, collapseists generally agree on the reality of a world facing multiple crises: climatic and ecological, but also financial, economic and social. They also agree on the urgency of developing solutions that involve radical changes in our lifestyles and our visions of the world, in resistance to exceeding planetary limits. While recognizing the value and importance of explaining the disastrous effects of our ways of living on nature and our societies, critics of collapseist discourses nevertheless reproach them for relying on a catastrophism that is difficult to overcome and for not holding takes sufficient account of some of the major systemic causes behind the disasters they discuss, including capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy.
It is on the basis of these criticisms that a significant part of the European left has come to reject the collapse theory and characterize it as “apolitical”, believing it to carry feelings of fear and impotence likely to curb mobilization and collective action, or even to promote an everyone-for-himself ideology blocking any prospect of social change.
For the philosopher Michaël Foessel, for example, the hypothesis of an imminent and irreversible collapse of our societies establishes a “new political approach to time, radically anti-utopian” (“The apocalypse without the promise”, Research in religious sciences, flight. 108, no. 1, 2020, p. 67), in view of which collective emancipation becomes unthinkable. Faced with a future lost in advance, collapseism only succeeds, in this perspective, in reducing the imagination of possibilities to the sole entrenchment in a spiritualist ethic which, at best, makes it possible to “save” the present in the future. individual scale without being able to act on the state of the world. For others, the essence of the problem lies rather in the posture of strategic neutrality or openly apolitical assumed by certain collapseists themselves, in a desire to “objectively” base their theory and to rally as many people as possible to it.
Indifference
On this account, it must be seen that the theory of collapse is distinguished from the catastrophist positions which precede it, most of which come from philosophy, by its anchoring in a discourse with scientific pretensions. […] More than a simple threat, collapse is thus naturalized into an irreversible and inextricable situation to which it is more necessary than ever to learn to adapt, failing being able to change it.
However, by proceeding in this way, their critics point out, these authors and those who take up their ideas contribute to fueling indifference in the face of the socio-political causes of the collapses already underway, including, first and foremost, the power relations and inequalities which emerge behind the trends they observe. […] Under the pretext of avoiding division, finally, this refusal of politics would also nourish fallback positions, bringing grist to the mill of right-wing movements and solutions which exacerbate inequalities and injustices without tackling the real sources of problems.
The fact remains, however, that by focusing our attention on antagonisms, we quickly come to forget the most interesting aspects of the positions criticized. Indeed, beyond their shortcomings, collapseist discourses at least achieve their primary target: to get us out of collective denial regarding the scale of current crises and to generate public discussion around decisive questions for the future of the planet and the world. world as we know it. […]
Catastrophism is not only negative; it can be “enlightened”, as Jean-Pierre Dupuy suggests […]following Hans Jonas or Günther Anders before him. […] In their most interesting versions, the “collapsonaut” postures […] open the door to new ways of thinking about politics and life together from the collapse, focusing on the criticism of inequalities and oppressions as much as on ethics and the care to be taken to the affects that define us, these being in their eyes inseparable. For others, finally, the collapse calls for the creation of plural and pluralist political imaginations, capable of calling into question in different forms the hubris which distances us from the essential. […]
Comments or suggestions for Ideas in Review? Write to [email protected].