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Presentation short abstract

Our aim is an environmental updating of Critical Theory that requires decolonizing its normative foundations in such a way that this overhaul enables Critical Theory to face up, through an adequate theoretical model, to environmental injustice in the age of the crisis of life on Earth.

Presentation long abstract

In his 1843 letter to Ruge, Marx summed up the critical task as “the awareness, the clarification brought about by the present time of its own struggles and aspirations”. The same theoretical preoccupation with the issues of the day is that which, almost a century later, Horkheimer set himself in 1923 in the seminal text Traditional Theory and Critical Theory. Yet, despite this programmatic manifesto in the founding texts of Critical Theory, there is still silence on the environmental question. Henceforth, our aim will be (i) to reflect on the relevance of the environmental crisis as a philosophical problem. Then (ii) to reflect on the state of development of environmental justice, and thus weigh up the relevance of Critical Theory's treatment of the ecological question. Then, once these preliminary questions have been resolved, (iii) we will return to the sources of Critical Theory, to the history of its philosophy, in order to make an exegesis of the question of the relationship with nature as a common thread running through its preoccupations. Finally (iv), we will have to judge to what extent an environmental updating of Critical Theory requires the need of decolonizing its normative foundations in such a way that this overhaul enables Critical Theory to face up, through an adequate theoretical model, to environmental injustice in the age of the crisis of life on Earth.