Cannelle Gignoux | Associate Postgraduate

Critical Thinking in the Plural. Conceptual Approaches in Research in the Social Sciences
Centre Marc Bloch, Friedrichstraße 191, D-10117 Berlin
Email: cannelle.gignoux  ( at )  hotmail.fr Tel: +49(0) 30 / 20 93 70700

Home Institution : Uni Paris 8 | Disciplines : Philosophy |

Supervisor
Eric Alliez et Matthieu Renault

Antagonism, property, nature: a return to the interpretations of K. Marx's Manuscripts of 1857-1858 at the time of the ecological crisis

My research focuses on the interpretations of the 1857-1858 Manuscripts of K. MARX, often considered as the first preparatory draft for Capital. My objective is to bring together two traditions that have nothing to do with each other, apart from the fact that they are interested in the Grundrisse. It is the study of the chapter on forms prior to capitalist production on the one hand, and the Fragment on Machines on the other, that attracted my attention for the visionary statements they make. On the one hand, a questioning of the historicism usually reproached to K. Marx, on the other hand, a criticism of technology and science. The objective of my research is to articulate ecological interpretations proper to the analysis of metabolism in the Grundrisse to a thought of emancipation attached to operaism. 

The objective of my first two years of thesis was twofold. On the one hand, I wanted to deepen my knowledge of the eco-Marxist debate (Ted Benton, O'Connor, Jason Moore, J.B. Foster...) and on the other hand, I was interested in readings in political ecology and in the ontological turn in anthropology (Vivieros de Castro, Descola).

Concerning the eco-marxist debate, I was interested in authors such as Ted Benton, James O'Connor, John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett in order to confront their analyses with the text of K. Marx himself. I noted pitfalls in the three currents of eco-Marxism that can be distinguished as follows: 1) A unitary approach to the ecological crisis and the crisis of capitalism (O'Connor and Jason Moore) 2) An ecological reading of Marx's historical materialism (Ted Benton) and 3) the "metabolic break" school (P. Burkett, J.B. Foster). In the former, I noticed a stumbling blocks in the way of posing the ecological crisis as a crisis of capitalism. From O'Connor's second contradiction to J. Moore's world ecology, the singularity of the ecological crisis was reduced to one factor among others of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. In Ted Benton, on the contrary, I noticed a blindness concerning the possibility of reading the K. Marx (theory of value and exploitation) in an "ecological" way. The concept of "labor process" being considered as anthropocentric. For the third (Paul Burkett and J.B Foster) I noticed an overvaluation of the "ecological" reflections in K. Marx even defined Marx as a green prophet, in a historical period that had just seen the birth of the concept of ecology and that did not yet know the ecological crisis.