“Production” is not obvious, but constitutes a paradigm specific to our modern civilization which has replaced that of “generation”. On the one hand, a world created by an external principle, Almighty God, where an instrumental approach to the environment triumphs. On the other, a vernacular world where the (re)generation of life is at the heart of practices, mythologies and rites. Emilie Hache has been deepening this intuition for several years, without foreseeing that this “history of culture” what is Of the generation would appear at a time when the question of production would polarize the controversy of the ecological debate.
The ecofeminist philosopher is part of a constellation of thinkers attacking the foundations of modernity from the perspective of non-Western or living cultures, in the pioneering wake of the philosopher Bruno Latour (1947-2022) – of whom she is a disciple – and the anthropologist Philippe Descola. In the face of this movement, another critical galaxy has been rising for several months, marked by the Marxist tradition. In a polemical rather than academic tone, this mocks thoughts accused of drowning in harmless exoticism the centrality of capitalism in the ecological crisis.
If Of the generation raises the debate to a higher level of density by questioning the foundations of the concept of production, the theme of this ” investigation ” is not new. In the last pages of his canonical Beyond nature and culture (Gallimard, 2005), Philippe Descola already touched on it by emphasizing its mystification. The farmer does not “produce” wheat, but directs a biological process; a factory does not “produce” cars, but transforms material. Qualifying such processes as “production” allows their protagonists to appropriate the fruit of the transformation. By proposing a genealogy of this notion, Emilie Hache therefore uncovers a decisive cog in our contemporary condition.
The strength of the lecturer at the University of Nanterre is not to directly criticize production, but to examine it from another paradigm, that of (re)generation. All his thinking revolves around a major thesis of a cosmological order: by thinking of their world as a perpetual engenderment, “pagan” societies, like ancient Greece, have placed at their center cults and beliefs oriented around the perpetuation of life. Christianity then intervened as a radical upheaval, because, by considering the cosmos as already created and by placing salvation in an eternity outside the world, it fertilized a civilization where a new mentality would reign.
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