Travailler (sur) les émotions écologiques, entre psychologisation du politique et désobéissance épistémique

What is the current fascination with eco-emotions a sign of? As affective
approaches to environmental issues gain popularity, we highlight a contradiction at their core: whereas they stand in potential convergence with subaltern epistemologies that challenge dominant scientific and political framings of ecological issues, they can nevertheless end up depoliticizing those same issues. Drawing on our own trajectories in environmental humanities, and bringing together environmental political theory, studies on ecological emotions and feminist and decolonial epistemology, our article discusses the points of attention and concern, but also the promises and conditions of a critical political theory of ecological affects. In the first part, we focus on the limits and pitfalls of ecological-affective approaches by underlining the fact that these may feed the psychologization, individualization and ultimately the commodification of ecological problems. In the second part, we argue that affective approaches still carry an important political potential of triggering epistemic disobedience and contributing to the emergence of an affected, anti-capitalist and less andro- and anthropocentric political ecology.