Bruno Latour has proposed describing the recent shift into the Anthropocene era as a ‘new climate regime’. From being the impassive backdrop to human affairs, the Earth's climate has become a political agent in its own right. Historians J.-B. Fressoz and F. Locher have challenged the radical nature of the divide between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ climate regimes in the name of the long duration of modern forms of environmental reflexivity. The aim here is to build on this debate by looking at the ‘undivided notion’ (Canguilhem) of ‘climate’ and the relationships it has developed throughout Western modernity with specific ways of governing people and environments. While knowledge about the climates of politics has varied according to the scales adopted (localclimates versus global climate ) and the grammars of action (the ‘influence’ exerted by climates versus anthropogenic ‘impact’), such variations testify to the same climatic ‘ideology’ (M. Hulme), many of whose presuppositions today deserve to be questioned in depth.

Louis Carré is an FNRS-qualified researcher in philosophy at the University of Namur. He co-directs the Arcadie centre (Anthropocene, history, utopias).

Moderator: Marc-Antoine Sabaté, ULB - CTP

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