Nature or Living? Thinking about Capitalism as a Way of Dominating Nature

Résumé 0

This article proposes to discuss the relevance of the category of the living in contemporary ecological debates. It shows that this category has a relative relevance, and that it can be used to criticize certain forms of exploitation of non-human beings, but that this relevance is not absolute, because it leaves in the shadows the role played by the extraction of non-living beings in environmental disasters. The article then seeks to revalorize the category of nature and to think of capitalism as a mode of domination of nature, in order to grasp all the forms of exploitation and extraction of nonhumans that characterize our times. To this end, it responds to antinaturalist criticisms of the concept of nature, and establishes the possibility of thinking something like “nature” without falling short of the objections of antinaturalism.