Abstract
The concept of “resilience” is nowadays at the core of governmentality paradigms, development agendas and geopolitical strategies – but in the context of “adaptation” policies to climate change, “resilience thinking” emerges in all its influence and normative power. In this article, I try to show how “resilience” is a recently developed political epistemology that opens up a new “ecological imaginary”. I would like to suggest that the imaginative disposition of resilience, promoting a scientific and political approach to socio-ecological “complexity”, paints scenarios of existential and social adaptation to the ecological crisis whose neoliberal hues are prominent and problematic. I thus refer to the ecological imaginary of resilience as a “gentle pessimism”, highlighting its integration into the economic-political status quo and its inability to imagine beyond the governmental models of neoliberal globalization.