“Ecology is the proof of dialectics.”[1] This idea formulated by John Bellamy Foster is the contemporary re-enunciation of Friedrich Engels’ assertion advancing that: “Nature is the proof of dialectics.”[2] These two premises are at the heart of the theoretical framework that my doctoral research proposes to mobilize in order to examine the dialogues between art and ecology in the contemporary period, and to contribute in an original way to the current reflection on the ecological turn – or imperative – in contemporary art.

Indeed, the planetary “metabolic rupture”[3] in progress highlighted the fundamental entanglement of all the levels of organization of the real, and in this sense led art to rethink itself, theoretically as well as in practice, within and with the yardstick of this condition of generalized interdependence that summarizes the term of ecology. Immersed in the world and stakeholders of this last one, numerous contemporary works thus propose to make sensitive and manifest this terrestrial interconnectivity composed of multiple human and non-human agentivities.

In doing so, these works articulate an overcoming of the anthropocentric vision and modern Western dualisms (nature/culture, body/spirit, inorganic/organic, …), conceived as substantial causes of the ecological crisis which in return highlights their untenable character.

Now, if this crisis sadly testifies of the unsurpassable unity of humanity (and of its forms of organization in societies and cultures) and nature, making undoubtedly all a certain modern ontology inadequate, we suggest that this crisis is more exactly a “real contradiction”[4] , testifying to the unity and the separation, the identity and the difference, of humanity and nature, calling then the category of unity of opposites and encouraging thus a dialectical and materialist thought as a fertile perspective to apprehend our condition.

Against any idealism, dualism, or reductive mechanism, dialectical materialism – of Marx and Engels to Foster and Sève among others – tries to do justice to the “dialectical intelligence of nature”[5], in the multiplicity of its forms of movement and in their interrelations and

processualities, and this from the most infinitesimal scale of matter itself up to the global antagonistic relation between the human in capitalist society and nature. Now, it seems to us that it is precisely there one of the central stakes of the turn or the ecological imperative of contemporary art, in its will to explore and to express the symbiotic vitality of nature in order to imagine new cosmologies in answer to the anthropocene.

My doctoral research wishes to make three main propositions and hypotheses within this theme: first, to show the relevance of a dialectical materialist approach to study these questions; second, to elaborate from a corpus of works of the contemporary period the idea of an aesthetics of dialectics; third, to formulate from this aesthetics the idea of a communism of life, as a horizon and a political imaginary between art and ecology.

[1] FOSTER John Bellamy, The Return of Nature. Socialism and Ecology, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020, p.254.

[2] ENGELS Friedrich quoted in FOSTER John Bellamy, The Return of Nature. Socialism and Ecology, ibid.

[3] Among others recently SAITO Kohei, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. Capitalism, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017.

[4] SÈVE Lucien (dir.), Sciences et dialectiques de la nature, Paris: La Dispute, 1998, p.168.

[5] Ibid, p.11.