Résumé
Since the end of World War II, Western agriculture went through deep changes. The switch to the agro-industrial system had major ecological, political, economical and social consequences, which have been quite well studied both by life sciences and humanities. However, the sensitive aspects of this major upheaval have often been neglected. This presentation is an attempt to understand the philosophical implications of what many farmers, when asked about the relations between them and the land they work with, spontaneously called an attachment. What this instinctive wording seems to imply, is that the relation to the land cannot be fully understand through the Modern prism describing the relations to non-human entities, i.e. with concepts such as property or exploitation. There is something else, complex and quite undefined, something indescribable with our Moderns categories; an attachment to a land and its history, to a landscape and the texture of a soil, to a flora and a fauna, in a word to a web of ecological, sensitive and co-constitutive bonds. From the description range of a relation to the land, we will unravel how agricultural modernization has been a violence to those attachments – an idea we will exemplify with case studies of conflictual regrouping of lands in France between the 1960’s and the 1990’s. Then, following Bruno Latour’s researches on the concept of attachment and examples taken from our own philosophical field inquiries, we will explore the philosophical conditions of an agriculture of relations, caring about attachments, eco-sensitive to the modalities of its relations with the living entities, and asking for « the right not to be deprive of the bonds that make one exist » (Latour).