Penser la peur au temps des catastrophes: Matériaux féministes pour une autodéfense affective

This thesis mobilizes the prism of affect to study the driving forces behind political powerlessness in the face of ecological devastation. It contributes to theorizing the ways in which affects, and fear in particular, are transformed, instrumentalized and made politically productive in times of catastrophe. The opposition between freedom and fear is a commonplace in political theory. This work however explores the possibility of a politics that would reveal the critical and emancipatory power of this affect, beyond trajectories of securitization and pathologization.The first chapter describes the risk of authoritarian drifts linked to ecological fears, offering a reading of Franz Neumann and Brian Massumi. The second chapter makes the diagnosis more complex, emphasizing with Günther Anders that fear is not only what governments generate for disciplinary purposes, but also what they repress to avoid resistance. The concept of ''desensitization devices'' can account for this often-overlooked relationship, in political theory, between repression of fear and political powerlessness. The thesis then goes on to explain the ways in which ecological thinking, starting from this very powerlessness, has come to grips with ecological anxieties. Chapters three and four look respectively at enlightened catastrophism and the politics of wonder. While these two seem diametrically opposed responses to powerlessness, they are in fact based on the same hypothesis, which limits their critical scope: that of an alleged ''lack'' of affects. The third part of the thesis then exhumes a set of concepts and practices inherited from second-wave feminism and ecofeminism, to envisage emancipatory counter politics of fear. Where the ''politics of emotion'' commonly refers to a heteronomous manipulation of affects, these activists sketch out an autonomous method of collective inquiry, mobilization and care that takes affects as the starting point for emancipatory strategies.