Contenu du sommaire : Au risque du matérialisme

Previously, “matérialisme” attracted those who attempted to extend to scientific knowledge and even to political action the methods that seemed to have proved fruitful in physics and chemistry. The belief in human progress through the accumulation of scientific understanding tended to ignore certain grey areas, such the ambiguities of the notion that assigns to matter the characteristics that classical science attributes to nature. Contemporary scientific practice and philosophical reflection has rediscovered, through a consideration of contingency, the infinite variety of material processes. Knowledge of determinations is thus no longer confused with the unfounded affirmation of inexorable necessity. Materialism can escape the limits of progressivism and open the way to a philosophy of liberty.

Critique of naturalist discourse about gender domination must allow the denaturalization of gender relations, including its biological representation — sex. From this perspective, two major feminist ideas seem determinant : queer thought and black feminism are related in calling into question binary catégories — male-female, men-women, force-weakness — that are said to be naturel. Queer thought develops subversive techniques that trace the ethical contours of body language ; there are no practices or identities against nature. For black feminism, racist conceptions of feminity (“to be women” and “to be black”) are designed to lend support to a complex system of domination in which racial, gender, sexual and class oppressions are combined to maintain the material conditions of reproduction.

The question of what feminist philosophy founded on liberty can have in common with the philosophy and practice of libertinism — for which sexual pleasure is had at the price of the domination of women in a heterosexual relationship — can be elucidated by an analysis of Simone de Beauvoir's Faut-il brûler Sade ? Beauvoir recognized a human possibility in Sade's position that merits understanding because it promotes an ethic. Representing an aristocracy dispossessed of any social authority, Sade re-conquered his sovereignty by projecting his imagination onto a despotic sexual practice.

Today if economic science has become the archetype of determinism in the social sciences, it has been at the expense of a certain type of objectivity founded upon a complex process of the reduction and naturalization of certains social relationships which can be seen in terms of a “realistic approach” or in terms of “value orientation”. A radical critique of this process requires the deconstruction of the dominant figure constituted by the analytical-normative couple : neoclassical theory and economic liberalism. It is only in denouncing the sublimation of greed for money, the foundation of this false objectivity, that economism can be radically critiqued, opening the way, in economic theory, to a truly anti-naturalist materialism.

Contrary to the other philosophies, materialism cannot abandon the unity of life and philosophy that is its very essence. Materialism is obliged to explore the non-theoretical genesis of theory, in the form of a sociology of knowledge, or out of a sensualist disposition. If the first is often rejected out of hand as a kind of parody of Marxism, a sensualist approach generally appears more promising. This approach, however, should not deny sensation its pleasure-pain dimension or attribute to it a simple point of departure instead of the status of prime objective. The unity of life and philosophy cannot be adequately interpreted if the order is reversed : Primum philosophare deinde vivere.

Driven out of metaphysics in Ancient Greece, at the beginning of the modern era the monster began to act like political power, an ontological condition of history. It took shape. By monster, we mean what weakens then terrorizes the power of those who consider themselves well born and, by virtue of it, the only ones empowered to direct. Eugenics, in different forms such as good genealogy or bio-power, attempts to develop in human beings the power over the life of the “multitude” which produces, innovates and develops a new subjectivity as a form of intellectual freedom in postmodenity. In this way, life is never naked because it is constantly the subject of the war waged by the dominant people who display their suffering bodies in order to distract attention from their joy and power of resistance against bio-political ingenuity, a new manifestation of eugenics.

By returning to the theme of the presence in the world as the lynch pin of materialism, we may identify the conditions for the foundation of a strictly anti-naturalist materialism. This thematic eliminates a sterile confrontation of subject and object, and simultaneously lends support to the following two propositions : the world is chronologically first ; the subject is logically first. Materialism free of any naturalism thus opens the way to a political practice that goes beyond a simple logic of emancipation, in favor of a norm promising true liberation.

Study of an educational institution taking action in order to give psychological assistance to students after the suicide of a classmate revealed how the image of a victim was propagated, transforming a personal tragedy into a collective drama following an epidemic model. The officials of this institution, despite their divergent points of view and the fact that some supported this model unreservedly and others called it into question, acted together to reproduce this epidemic schema of psychic trauma.