Chiara BOTTICI

Chiara Bottici est professeure au Département de Philosophie de la New School for Social Research de New York. Son travail est consacré à l’exploration des différents aspects de la politique de l’imagination. Au cours de ses premières années de recherche, elle s’est concentrée sur les domaines du mythe, de la mémoire et de la religion, avant de compléter ce travail en se concentrant sur le genre, les sexualités et la philosophie féministe.

Dans Imaginal politics: Images beyond Imagination and beyond the Imaginary (Columbia University Press, 2014), elle a développé une théorie générale sur le rôle politique de notre capacité à imaginer. Elle comprend cette aptitude à travers le concept philosophique d'imaginal qui désigne un espace psychologique à la fois individuel (comme le fruit de l’imagination individuelle) et collectif (comme l’imaginaire social). En conséquence, le concept d’imaginal échappe aux dichotomies telles que celles entre l’individuel et le social, ou l’imaginaire et le réel. Ce travail philosophique rassemble des études sur la mémoire sociale et collective, sur le mythe et le symbolisme politiques, sur la propagande ou encore sur la politique identitaire, soit l’ensemble des domaines où, particulièrement à l’ère des médias sociaux, l’individuel et le social fusionnent d’une manière souvent inattendue. Ces dernières années, Chiara Bottici a poursuivi cette recherche en se concentrant sur les régimes politiques néo-autoritaires et néo-fascistes, et en répondant à leurs critiques dans le volume Debating Imaginal Politics.

Dans son livre Anarchafeminism (Bloomsbury, 2022), elle a également développé une philosophie féministe basée sur la thèse suivante : l’oppression des femmes et des personnes LGBTQ+ est une chose toute spécifique qui nécessite une remise en question de l’ensemble des autres formes de domination, y compris l’exploitation capitaliste, la domination raciale et l’épuisement écologique. Ce dernier livre a été traduit en cinq langues, dont le français. Alors qu’une traduction française de son Manifeste anarcha-féministe, version abrégée du livre, est parue en janvier 2023, Anarchafeminisme paraîtra bientôt : sa venue à l’EHESS serait donc l’occasion de présenter et discuter cette traduction. Dans le projet scientifique proposé, Chiara Bottici présentera sa théorie de la politique imaginaire et ses travaux plus récents sur la manière dont le genre et les sexualités cartographient notre perception et notre action dans le monde social. 

Chiara Bottici est invitée dans le cadre de la collaboration entre l’EHESS et la New School.

 

 

Rethinking political myth, unpacking the settler-colonial dream of an “American Arcadia” 

Dans le cadre du séminaire Cosmologies et polythéismes anciens et contemporains : approches comparées du rapport à l'invisible.

• 9 janvier 2024 - 11h00-13h00 - INHA - 2 rue Vivienne 75002 Paris

The idea of an “American Arcadia”—a natural paradise and empty space for settlers to fill with their own civilization—is an important component of the American founding mythology. The white supremacist obsession with neo-classicism in architecture is only one aspect of this myth. The same narratives can be found even in contexts that reject white supremacy. In particular, I argue that theory and philosophy themselves can also be a site for reproducing this mythology. In this intervention, I therefore ask: Why are US banks, courts, federal buildings, but also libraries, colleges, and school curricula so consistently wrapped up in neoclassical garments? How is the myth of an “American Arcadia” glued together with that of “The Great Books” tradition? I begin by defining political myth and distinguishing it from ideology. The concept of an “American Arcadia” in American culture goes beyond an ideological description of reality — it aims to create a world mirrored by myth. This political myth maintains the settlers’ culture as the standard of knowledge, systematically erasing indigenous knowledge and traditions. Instead of abandoning this political myth as if it did not exist, however, I argue for a critical engagement with it and a pluralization of the possible founding mythologies for a more inclusive US society. Critical theory should go hand in hand with a feminist and decolonial attitude that effectively challenges epistemic privileges and produces a more open and pluralist political mythology.

  

Anarchafeminism

Dans le cadre du séminaire La fabrique des rapports. Une lecture de Pašukanis

• 10 janvier 2024 - 12h30-14h30 - Centre de colloques - Campus Condorcet - Aubervilliers - Salle 3.10

How can we be sure the oppressed do not become oppressors in their turn? How to put forward a call for a feminist position that does not turn the latter into yet another tool for oppression, or, even worst, white privilege? It has become something of a commonplace to argue that, in order to fight the subjugation of women, it is necessary to adopt a broad understanding of the more general mechanisms of domination, namely one that unpacks the ways in which different forms of oppression intersect with one another. Yet, strikingly enough, in the contemporary literature on intersectionality, there is hardly any mention of a particular feminist tradition of the past that has been claiming the same point for a very long time: anarchist feminism, or we prefer to call it, “anarchafeminism.” This talk reconstructs the genealogy of anarchafeminism, that is of a philosophy that combines two major claims: that there is something specific in the oppression of women, and the “second sexes” and that, in order to fight that oppression, we need to concomitantly untangle all the other forms of oppression, beginning with capitalist exploitation, racial discrimination, and an anthropocentric politics of domination over nature.

  

From individuality to transindividuality: towards a as queer ecology 

Dans le cadre du séminaire Comment vivre ensemble (si on ne partage pas la même espèce) : pour en finir avec l'idée d'écosystème.

• 30 janvier 2024 - 9h00-11h00 - INHA - 2 rue Vivienne 75002 Paris - Salle Walter Benjamin

In this talk, I will reconstruct Etienne Balibar’s reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, and assess his claim that individuality, in Spinoza, must always be understood as a form of transindividuality. Whereas a lot has been written on the notion of transindividuality, very few have insisted on the radical “ecocentric egalitarianism” (Arne Naess) that this view generates and how that can help to address some of the most urgent ecological issues of our time. In particular, in this conference, I will argue that such a transindividual social ontology generates a form of queer ecology that radically subverts the idea of scala naturae that we have inherited from Western metaphysics.

 

Queer ecology 

Dans le cadre du séminaire Recherches sur les homosexualités. Études LGBTI.

• 31 janvier 2024 - 16h30-18h30 - Humathèque - Campus Condorcet - Aubervilliers - Salle 2.11

In this conference, I argue for the need to combine a decolonial ecofeminist approach with a philosophy of transindividuality inspired by Etienne Balibar’ and Moira Gatens’ reading of Spinoza’s Ethics. The latter depicts a form of “somatic communism” (Paul Preciado), in which every individuality is conceived as a transindividuality, that is a process of becoming that takes place at the supra, inter and infra-individual level, and that generates therefore a form of eco-centric egalitarianism. By questioning all rigid boundaries, along with the hierarchies that they sustain, the philosophy of transindividuality transform ecofeminism into a queer ecology, one where the Christian and Western idea of a scala naturae, according to which man> woman> slave> animal> inanimate matter, is radically questioned. As such, we will argue that queer ecology is not only an ecology produced by queer people, but also one that questions the heteropatriarchal world and the gender binarism we have inherited from Western modernity.

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