Research: The "mise en politique" of the environment. Perspectives on the deep past of modern environmental reflexivity (1789-1848)
The project stems from the hypothesis of a deep relationship between the processes of post-politicization and politicization of the environment: the idea is that the way in which the history of modern environmental reflexivity and problematization of the environment is represented - that is, the process by which, in a Foucauldian sense, human relationships with the environment have been invested as objects of scientific knowledge, philosophical analysis, and political intervention - has played (and continues to play) a fundamental role in post-politicization dynamics, shaping itself as one of the decisive arenas in which the post-political framework has been forged, configured, and rooted. If the architecture of most discourses on contemporary environmental concerns is based on the narrative of a slow, recent, and progressive emergence of environmental reflexivity - the idea that the environment has gained philosophical, scientific, and political attention only in the last decades of the 20th century - the aim of the project is to recover the sense of plurality and heterogeneity of the ways in which the environment is politically relevant in modernity, striving to articulate its historicity at an essentially discontinuous pace. In order to genealogically deconstruct the widespread idea of the absence of a concern (theoretical, ethical, political, and social) for the environment in modernity, an attempt will be made to map some of the different ways in which the “mise en politique” of the environment - its becoming an object of public questioning and controversy, as well as of articulated policies - has been invoked, promoted, and contested in the context of the French Revolution, through a (quantitative and qualitative) analysis of a corpus selected from the Cahiers de doléances.
Keywords: environmental reflexivity, French Revolution, political ecology, environmental history.