The researcher Thierry Ribault sees in resilience a “technology of consent”: training populations to adapt to disasters would exempt us from tackling their causes. This criticism is serious and documented. I argue that it hits individualised resilience, but that a co-resilience working together on Félix Guattari’s three ecologies, mental, social and environmental, is on the contrary a political practice, provided we turn it into concrete acts, down to the details of the settings in which we gather, and organise disagreement within them.
The technology of consent
Thierry Ribault, a social science researcher at the CNRS, carried out fieldwork in Fukushima after the 2011 nuclear accident (Contre la résilience. À Fukushima et ailleurs, “Against resilience. In Fukushima and elsewhere”, L’Échappée, 2021). There he observed programmes that teach inhabitants to live in a contaminated zone: measuring by themselves the radioactivity of their garden and their food, adjusting their diet and their movements, becoming agents of their own protection. His analysis is that these programmes make the disaster inhabitable, hence acceptable, and that the political question of causes and responsibilities turns there into an individual question of behaviour. Resilience then works as a technology of consent, which manufactures adaptation where contestation would be needed. This criticism converges, on another terrain, with my analyses of the unanimity produced by fear in the article What fear did to us: in both cases, a vocabulary of protection serves to obtain conducts without any debate on what makes them necessary. France lived through an ordinary version of this during the heatwave of summer 2026, when the recommendations were addressed to individuals, drink water, close the shutters, while the collective causes, starting with housing built like thermal kettles, remained out of the picture; I developed this example in the article Landing together.
Serge Tisseron, from the wariness of 2007 to co-resilience
Serge Tisseron is a psychiatrist, a doctor in psychology and a member of the French Académie des technologies; he founded and chairs the IHMéC, the Institute for the history and memory of disasters, and the idea of the workshops on the imaginary of disasters that I presented in the article Building Co-Resilience comes from him. His position on resilience took shape long before his opinion piece of August 2026. As early as La Résilience (PUF, 2007), he traces the history of the notion, American at first, criticises the conception popularised in France, which only envisages resilience within an individual frame, as a capacity that some people would have and others not, denounces its commercial exploitation by what he calls “sellers of happiness”, and points out what this conception leaves aside, prevention, the collective dimension, chronic stresses. Twenty years later, he extends this refusal by writing that “there is no resilience, only co-resiliences”: the capacity of each system to recover depends on that of all the others, and a resilient society presupposes reducing inequalities. In this fifth wave of resilience, as he names it, we find part of Ribault’s criticism, the refusal to essentialise the capacity to bounce back, the refusal to confine it to individuals, the stated condition of a better life outside crises. The shift is real. But the risk Ribault points to does not disappear with the move to the collective, for a “territorial resilience” can very well become a perfected crisis management that leaves the causes of crises untouched. And the question of disagreement, who names the causes, who decides, who contests, remains outside Serge Tisseron’s purpose, whose characteristic gesture is to gather people around care; this is the point where I wish to extend his work rather than oppose it. A criterion is missing to distinguish political co-resilience from its managerial version, and it is this criterion that I am looking for.
Félix Guattari, an ecology born in a clinic
Félix Guattari did not conceive The Three Ecologies in a philosopher’s office. A psychoanalyst, he worked from 1955 until his death in 1992 at the La Borde clinic, founded by the psychiatrist Jean Oury, a home of institutional psychotherapy, whose principle is that one cannot care for people without caring for the institution itself, its places, its atmosphere, the circulation of speech, and where caregivers and patients share the kitchen, the garden, the theatre; I described in the article Being a subject with technologies, or being their object what my mediation practice owes to this school. A companion in thought of Gilles Deleuze, with whom he wrote Anti-Oedipus (1972) then A Thousand Plateaus (1980), engaged in alternative movements and free radio stations, Guattari published The Three Ecologies in 1989 (Galilée) against the reduction of ecology to the sole question of the environment. His observation is that the degradation of natural environments, the decomposition of solidarities and the impoverishment of psyches, standardised by mass media, form a single process, produced by what he names Integrated World Capitalism, and that none of these three registers can be cared for separately. He calls ecosophy their articulation, which I presented in the article Presence and adaptation. With him, these three ecologies come from a work practised before being written: at La Borde, reorganising the kitchen rota and the circulation of speech already meant acting at the same time on psyches, on social relations and on the environment.
The three ecologies as a criterion
It is in these three ecologies that I find the missing criterion, for each of the drifts of resilience corresponds to one ecology worked on alone:
- When we work only on mental ecology, we produce personal development. We equip psyches to bear the unbearable, we teach the inhabitants of Fukushima to measure their contamination, and this is Ribault’s target.
- When we work only on social ecology, we produce management. Plans, protocols, chains of command, evacuation drills, without subjectivity or examination of causes, and populations become variables to be administered.
- When we work only on environmental ecology, we produce technical solutionism. We raise the dykes without touching anything of what makes the waters rise, we air-condition the buildings without touching anything of what overheats the cities.
Co-resilience deserves its name when we act on the three registers at once and go back to the causes, that is, when, in preparing for crises, we also transform the social relations and the modes of production that engender them. I showed in the same article Building Co-Resilience that this architecture corresponds to the three levels of organisation, micro, meso and macro, that Serge Tisseron distinguishes, and that, in a creative workshop about disasters, we work on the three registers simultaneously. Here I turn to the other side of the same criterion, the political side: the three ecologies make it possible to judge a setting, and above all they make it possible to build one.
Raising awareness of the setting together
I deal with this political dimension less by writing about it than by lodging it in the very settings in which I intervene. When I give a lecture, I do not only prepare a content, I think about the setting of the lecture, the layout of the room, the place given to others, the moments when speech circulates, the possibility of contesting what has just been said. And every time I organise something, I propose to the people concerned to discuss it beforehand, so that together we become aware of our setting, its rules, what it allows and what it prevents. The three ecologies then become very concrete acts: mental ecology lies in the safety that allows each person to express what they really think and feel, social ecology lies in the way speech and decisions circulate, who speaks, for how long, who decides, and environmental ecology lies in the place of the meeting, the layout of the chairs, the light, and in anchoring the work in the real territory of the people present. I described these ways of doing in the articles Facilitating collective intelligence and cooperation dynamics and Contribution cannot be commanded.
The anthropologist Tim Ingold sheds light, for me, on this methodological choice. In Making (2013), he attacks the hylomorphic model, the old idea according to which creating would consist in imposing a form conceived by the mind on a passive matter, and describes making as a correspondence with materials, which we follow and let teach us; I developed this thinking in the article The Adventitious Subject. It is the same with political values as with forms: we do not apply them to a meeting from the outside, like a regulation laid over a human matter, we discover and adjust them while preparing and leading the meeting with the people it concerns. Concretely, before a training day, I ask the organisers what they expect, I submit the schedule to them, and it happens that this schedule changes because someone objected. This objection, welcomed before the session, is already, for everyone present, an experience of the place of disagreement.
The place of disagreement
One last trait distinguishes a political co-resilience from a consent machine: the fate it reserves for disagreement. Disasters give rise to sacred unions, and the sacred union is the moment when criticism becomes betrayal; we went through this collective experience during the Covid period. Chantal Mouffe, whom I drew on in the article Power, potency, domination, argues that democracy does not consist in dissolving conflicts but in giving them a form in which adversaries recognise each other as legitimate. I dealt in the article Landing together with the conflict that the ecological class must take on with the interests that profit from inhabitability; here it is about something else, the disagreement among those who prepare together, about the causes, about the priorities, about the distribution of efforts. In a democratic co-resilience, we organise this disagreement instead of suspending it in the name of urgency: we plan moments when the setting itself can be contested, we guarantee that a refusal costs no one their belonging to the group, and we take objections as information about vulnerabilities, not as obstacles to mobilisation.
We can then submit any setting that claims resilience, a municipal emergency plan, a “resilient territory” programme, a workshop like mine, to a series of questions:
- Who names the causes of the disaster, and do the inhabitants take part in this naming?
- Who decides on the measures of preparation and protection, and to whom are these people accountable for their decisions?
- What place is given to contestation, before the crisis, during the crisis and after it?
- What happens to a person who refuses the setting: are they heard, or designated as a danger?
- Do inequalities come out of it reduced, or does the effort of adaptation rest on the most fragile?
- Are the three ecologies worked on together, or only one, the psyches, the protocols or the infrastructures?
- Do the inhabitants’ knowledges weigh as much as the experts’ in the assessment of vulnerabilities?
- Can the setting itself be discussed and modified by those it concerns?
From these answers, we can tell whether we are dealing with a politics or with an anaesthesia, far more surely than from the vocabulary used.
