Maria GraceEsthétiques du care pour l'anthropocène

Is there anything left to do? To say? To think about? Can we continue to believe that knowledge is enough to change our behaviour and our decisions? What is valuable enough for us, as humans, to face up to planetary emergencies?

This book explores the imaginary dimensions of the various crises of habitability that are shaping the era known as the ‘Anthropocene’. It offers an aesthetic response to a moral question. Thinking about the Anthropocene from a moral perspective means asking how our decisions are shaped and made, and according to what scales of value we decide what matters and what will be interpreted as secondary, contextual or incidental.

Based on a reading of the crises in the ethics of care, this analysis explores the hypothesis that the Anthropocene is based on a sensitive and moral dimension; that our way of desiring, imagining and dreaming is also shaped in an anthropocenic way, both individually and collectively.

The aesthetics of ‘care’ are presented here as alternatives practised in the global South to debate the imaginaries to which we refer in order to feel and think about crises. They are both a concept and an embodied practice. These pages open up a decolonial option for interpreting crises and possible courses of action.

In this sense, it opens up alternatives to the modern world-system, which homogenises and offers no place for everyone, because this model is leading the planet towards an imbalance that threatens life as a whole.

María Grace Salamanca Gonzaléz is a theatre actress and doctor of philosophy. Her doctorate was a joint project between the University of Lyon and the “Social actors of medicinal flora in Mexico” research programme of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). A lecturer in ethics, bioethics and epistemology, she is a specialist in epistemologies of the South, a practitioner of decolonial aesthetics in their theatrical form, and a member of clinical and research ethics committees (in Mexico).