Anne Fremaux
NurembergMeet Anne Fremaux, associate professor, doctor of philosophy and author...
Studies, readings, projects... Here is what she has to say!
Could you introduce yourself? What are you currently doing?
I am an agrégée and doctor of philosophy. My background is rather atypical: I began at business school and worked in marketing before devoting myself to philosophy. I completed my two-year preparatory degree in Tours and then my bachelor's, master's and DEA degrees in Grenoble.
Passionate about ecology and the theme of nature — which I had first encountered in my HEC preparatory classes — I wrote my first political and philosophical essay in 2011: La nécessité d'une écologie radicale (ed. Sang de la terre). I then spent a year at Sciences Po Grenoble preparing for the ENA entrance examination, for which I was eligible. Personal circumstances then took me to Germany and the UK, where I completed my doctoral thesis on environmental philosophy and political ecology.
In parallel, I wrote a speculative fiction novel on a theme that fascinates me — post/transhumanism — entitled L'Ère du Levant (ed. Rroyzz, 2016). My thesis has since been published by an American press under the title After the Anthropocene: Green Republicanism in a Post-Capitalist World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
I am currently looking for an academic post in my field of research or in classical philosophy.
I am a fairly eclectic philosopher who believes strongly in bringing philosophy into the wider public conversation. It seems to me that philosophy ought to engage with contemporary subjects — as has long been the case in the English-speaking world, where philosophy departments offer courses on "the philosophy of sport", "the philosophy of economics", and so on. During my years teaching in Grenoble, I played an active part in taking the discipline to a broader audience through lectures given within companies (CEA, Hewlett Packard) and through the Société Alpine de Philosophie. This is also why I believe it is imperative for philosophy to engage with the ecological crisis — the defining challenge currently facing humanity.
That said, I do not think we can do without the study of the great authors and classical texts: these are foundational before any successful excursion into new territory. I am therefore enormously grateful to the French school and university system for the quality of the education it gave me, combining intellectual rigour with demanding standards. My travels have shown me that this is a very distinctly French quality, and it is with real sadness that I watch what seems to be its inexorable decline.
What memories do you have of your studies and your teachers?
I remember my final-year philosophy teacher as a man of easy good humour and a quintessentially "philosophical" appearance: dishevelled hair, unshaven, a faraway look, seemingly lost in thought and affecting not to notice the chatter in the room. I do not remember much of his lessons, however, apart from one essay topic on which I particularly struggled: "Is existence simply living?" Even today, I find the question somewhat sterile — too deeply embedded in a specific philosophical tradition, since it depends almost entirely on the meanings and values that philosophers have assigned to the terms involved.
In my HEC preparatory classes, I genuinely took to philosophy — not because of any great personal warmth on the part of the teacher, but because of the quality of his classes (probably in inverse proportion). The theme of nature, philosophically sidelined since Socrates and Plato, was returning to centre stage. It is a subject that has never left me.
Then came my discovery of the great authors: wonderful courses on Kant (CPR, CFJ) by Alain Séguy-Duclot in Tours, and on Hegel by J.-M. Lardic in Grenoble.
Finally, there are the generous lectures and advice of my thesis supervisor in Belfast, Professor John Barry, who introduced me to a form of philosophy that was applied, relevant, and — I would go so far as to say — necessary.
Which philosophical book were you particularly passionate about? Is there an author you fell in love with at first sight?
My answer is not going to be terribly original: during my studies, I was captivated by two major works. First, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787) by Kant, which we read in class like a thriller. Our teacher would pause his lecture at a critical moment — for instance, just after laying out the contradictory positions, or antinomies, that Kant was about to resolve — and we would wait impatiently for the next session to find out how he did it. Each time, it produced a kind of guaranteed intellectual exhilaration in the face of the master's genius.
The second work was The Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel (1807), which I studied closely during my master's, focused mainly on Kant and Hegel. Here again, I discovered the philosopher's genius and his key concept, Aufhebung (sublation) — the overcoming of dialectical contradictions in a new synthesis in which the negative is negated and the positive retained. In my thesis, I myself attempted a kind of Aufhebung (far humbler than Hegel's, of course) to show that neo-republicanism preserves the best of both liberalism and socialism while transcending them both (wink ;-)).
My favourite authors include Merleau-Ponty for phenomenology; Hannah Arendt and her first husband Günther Anders; Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse for critical theory (the Frankfurt School); and, among more recent thinkers, Castoriadis, Gorz, Illich, Chomsky, and Mouffe.
At the moment, I am discovering the Italian philosopher Umberto Galimberti, who in his work The Reasons of the Body invites us to renew our philosophical perspective on the body. His essay opens with Nietzsche's formula: There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom
... A vast programme, skilfully explored!
What are your research projects and interests?
My first academic book, La nécessité d'une écologie radicale (ed. Sang de la terre, 2011), was an attempt at an intellectual synthesis across different fields of ecological thought — from environmental ethics and philosophy to anthropology, "green" economics, and political ecology.
I explored the meaning of the "ecological crisis" — the fact that we are now living in an age of finitude (The age of the finite world is beginning
, as Paul Valéry put it in 1931) — which calls for moderation and restraint, in contrast to the dreams of endless abundance propagated by productivist, and in particular capitalist, economics.
The notion of "limits" has always been central to political theory, insofar as any system of government seeks to establish the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate aspirations and possibilities of existence. In recent decades, the concept of "ecological limits" has been pivotal in raising public awareness of the need to protect the ecosphere and the conditions that sustain life on the planet.
Yet theories of ecological modernisation — and in particular "green" capitalism, now repackaged as eco-modernism — contest this notion by defending the myth of decoupling: the idea that the use of natural resources can be separated from economic growth through technological progress. This hoped-for decoupling has never materialised, however, and will in all likelihood never do so, owing to a paradox identified by Jevons*. What is needed, therefore, is not simply more "green" technologies, but above all more democracy and more political and philosophical debate about the kind of society we wish to inhabit.
My thesis takes up all these themes, developing them through a new paradigm: that of ecological republicanism, which I set out in my book from social, economic, anthropological, and political perspectives. In After the Anthropocene: Green Republicanism in a Post-Capitalist World (NY: Palgrave, 2019; my translation), drawn from my doctoral thesis, I analyse the concept of the Anthropocene as part of the techno-managerial and deliberately apolitical logic that has come to dominate discussion of the environmental crisis. Against this view, the green republicanism I defend calls for social, ethical, cultural, economic, and political transformation. It is to the renewal of political institutions at local, national, and international level that all my research is now devoted.
* The Jevons paradox refers to the observation that as technological improvements increase the efficiency with which a resource is used, total consumption of that resource tends to rise rather than fall.
Thank you, Anne, for sharing your story!
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