What are the implications of this expression, or missive, around which a generation of philosophers, anthropologists, climatologists, geo-physicists, researchers and experts have rallied ? Does it imply that the consequence of political engagement and ‘utopias’ have compelled us to ”lose control” ? Or rather to rethink, with a new interpretive framework for critique, the here and now, the grounds for our life, that we have never really regarded, or considered as the site for political action. Can this ‘material turn’, initiated in the sociology of science in the 1980s that has inspired revisions in the social sciences, ethnology and art history, draw new paths for returning to earth ?

About Patricia Falguières

Patricia Falguières is a professor at the École des hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, The School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences) in Paris. Her work has primarily concentrated on philosophy and the art of the Renaissance and its classifications, encyclopedias, indexes and the birth of the museum in modern Europe. In parallel, she is active in the field of contemporary art, through articles and essays, monographic publications or writing on conceptual art, the relationships between art and theatre in the twentieth century. She contributed to the critical edition of Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube (2008). She runs several history and art theory research programmes. She initiated the series of Lectures Maison Rouge at La Maison Rouge, Paris, and she co-directs the seminars Something You Should Know at the EHESS with Élisabeth Lebovici and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez. In 2011, Centre Pompidou organised a programme of conferences and encounters proposing perspectives on history and art criticism entitled According to Patricia Falguières. She lives and works in Paris.