A Note on Corine Pelluchon
- A Note on Corine Pelluchon
Corine Pelluchon is professor of philosophy at Paris-Est-Marne-La-Vallée and one of the foremost feminist political philosophers and bioethicists in France. Her major works, which have been translated into Spanish, German, Korean, Greek, Italian, and Japanese, include L’autonomie brisée. Bioéthique et philosophie (The Broken Autonomy: Bioethics and Philosophy) (PUF 2009), La raison du sensible. Entretiens autour de la bioéthique (Reason and Sensitivity: Interviews on Bioethics) (Artège 2009), and Eléments pour une éthique de la vulnérabilité. Les hommes, les animaux, la nature (Elements for an Ethics of Vulnerability: Humans, Animals, and Nature) (Le Cerf 2011).
Recently, Bloomsbury published a translation of Les nourritures: philosophie du corps politique (Nourishment: A Philosophy of the Political Body) (Le Seuil 2015; Bloomsbury 2019), which won both the Prix Édouard Bonnefous of the French Academy for Moral and Political Sciences 2015 and the Paris-Liège Literary Prize 2016. In this original and important book, her first translated into English, Pelluchon offers nothing less than a new social contract that does justice to the biosphere and to other animals, as well as to human life and future generations. On the basis of a phenomenology of food and nourishment, she shows how freedom depends on the love of life and on sharing what nourishes with others. Pelluchon also takes up the practical challenge of reimagining democratic institutions to sustain this ethics of life.
The excerpt presented here, translated by Jonathan Sinnreich, PhD candidate in philosophy at Stony Brook University, is from Éthique de la considération (Ethics of Considération) (Seuil 2018). In this text, Pelluchon poses the question of why it is so difficult to change the way humans live, given the overwhelming evidence that current practices and models of development have a devastating impact on the environment, as well as the health and quality of life of both humans and other animals. In answer, Pelluchon develops an ethics of considération: she maps out a moral education that would produce an experience of the continuity of human beings with other living beings, and she shows how this sense of belonging to a common world could be transformed into practical knowledge and action. This new global attitude, she argues, would emancipate [End Page 165] individuals from current destructive practices and models and enable them to promote a more generative approach to the economy and politics. In this excerpt, Pelluchon outlines the affinities of her approach with ecofeminism.
The complete text of Éthique de la considération by Corine Pelluchon, © Éditions du Seuil, 2018, is available at http://www.seuil.com/ouvrage/ethiquede-la-consideration-corine-pelluchon/9782021321593 [End Page 166]
Mary C. Rawlinson is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Justice Life: Bioethics and the Future of Sexual Difference (Columbia 2016), and the editor of, among other volumes, the Routledge Handbook on Food Ethics (2016). Rawlinson was the Founding Editor of IJFAB (2006–16).
