Ayşe Yuva

Ayşe Yuva is a researcher in French, German, and Turkish philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She previously held academic positions at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, the University of Lorraine of Halle-Wittenberg, the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin and the Centre français de recherche en sciences sociales (CEFRES) in Prague. She is also a graduate of the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (IPA). Her dissertation, published in 2016 under the title Transformer le monde? L’efficace de la philosophie en temps de Révolution (1794-1815), focuses on the political effects attributed to philosophy in France and Germany at the end of the French Revolution.

Working from a transnational perspective, her approach is based on a non-normative method and focusses on unusual objects for the history of modern philosophy, such as the construction of boundaries. She analyses the political purpose and the philosophical dimension of texts not included in the canon of political philosophy, which tends to ignore its historical dimension. Philosophy is political not just when it studies political institutions, but also when it engages in self-scrutiny, reflecting on its framework, its limits, and the conditions of its actions.

Materialism has often been reduced to reduction, whether from an ontological, epistemological, ethical, or artistic point of view. In materialist doctrines, mind would be reduced to matter, scientific explanation reduced to the primacy of natural or economic forces, human life reduced to natural or necessary needs, and art reduced to a doctrine. These reductions, often produced from a polemical perspective, must however be analysed as historical facts, both philosophical and political. It would be pointless to simply reject them: they must be understood in their historical and transnational complexity.

In a contemporary perspective, the project analyses the dialogue and the quarrel between neo-materialist and critical theories today, frequently seen as irreducible to one another. How can we articulate the forces of nature and social factors, for instance in the current debates on the reductive imperatives of contemporary ways of living? One of the aims of this project is, therefore, to go beyond the alternative between frugality and productivism, two terms materialism has often been reduced to, and to analyse the tension between the slogan ‘luxury for all’ and the need for degrowth.