Au-delà des limites: pour un nouvel imaginaire culturel

The need for the implementation of limits — to production, to consumption, to our domination of ‘Nature’, to the wielding of power — has, with humanity’s belated collective awareness of its planet’s climate crisis, become urgent. But are limits alone sufficient to change the more disastrous possible outcomes, and even if they were by what political mechanism can they be brought about ? This article shows how the dual movement of capitalism and unbridled techno-science (Ellul, Charbonneau, Castoriadis) has unrelentingly propelled humanity towards a stage in its history where limitation is already too late to save the system as we have known it. Global society must now fundamentally alter its use of the planet’s ressources and create a new culture in which production and futile labour (Rensi, Gorz) give way to a way of life that not only respects humanity’s environment but humans themselves. To achieve such a cultural shift, power itself must be bridled (Castoriadis, Zhuangzi, Billeter) and a new popular, democratic practice put in place.