What is CRMEP? What has it been? And what is it becoming?

The times lead us inevitably to reflect on these questions, and the bringing together of the essays in this seventh volume of the CRMEP book series gives us a good occasion to do so. This volume includes a lecture first presented at a CRMEP conference, contributions drawn from CRMEP PhD students' work, essays from visiting researchers to CRMEP and contributions born out of the association of members of CRMEP with others' initiatives. Together they demonstrate that 'CRMEP' - an idea willed into existence by Peter Osborne in 1993 - encompasses a broader community of fellow travellers than just those who work or study (or who have worked and studied) under its auspices.

We have called this volume Conjunctions because the various themes which run through it - social and biological reproduction, the relationship between organic, social and technological life, the relations of all of these to sexuality and the relations between disciplines - do not form a unified picture, but they do reflect a particular state of relations between various fields in and adjacent to CRMEP as a historical project. Peter Osborne's 'Temporalities of Reproduction: Buffon-Quesnay-Marx' was presented to the 2024 CRMEP Graduate Conference 'Care, Commons, Reproduction', the topics of which spoke to aspects of the doctoral research of several of the PhD student organizers. That conference drew together three concepts that animate much contemporary critical theory. Osborne's chapter in this volume investigates the transdisciplinary conceptual history of one of those terms - reproduction - as the theoretical background for understanding (among other things) the relation between the Marxist critique of political economy and the fields of Gender and Critical Race Studies. Katrine Høghøj, one of the CRMEP PhD students, addresses this same relation in a different way, via a critical discussion of the enmity between Marxist Social Reproduction Theory and 'intersectional' feminist theories of various kinds.

The problems - and the opportunities - opened by thinking about and within the relations between disciplines are central to both Aino-Marjatta Mäki's and Niklas Toivakainen \& Salla Aldrin Salskov's essays - albeit in markedly different ways, from different standpoints and with different ends in mind. Nevertheless, the distinctive conjunction/disjunction 'philosophy and psychoanalysis' - the problematic of which Mäki, in particular, skewers - has been an abiding theme in CRMEP and one of the hinges of its collaborations with other research groups.

Osborne's essay also bears witness to another area of research developed within CRMEP in recent years: the relationship between the history of philosophy, the history of natural history and the history of the life sciences (often, but not exclusively, focusing on Immanuel Kant and his concept of race). This has developed alongside a growing concentration on environmental philosophy, plant philosophy and philosophy of biology (the conjunction of the latter - philosophy of biology - with modern European philosophy rendering it a little strange perhaps to the mainstream). CRMEP PhD student Finian Worrall's chapter in this volume is a direct example: the centring of environmental philosophy - and particularly environmental ethics - in the context of critical analyses of capitalist forms and processes. Judith Bastie, a visiting researcher at CRMEP in 2023-24, connects this research constellation with a central figure in the modern European tradition, Michel Foucault. Foucault is of course well known from The Order of Things for his concentration on the history of natural history, but Bastie re-presents that focus here in light of the centrality to his work of botany and the history of botany, unearthing the surprising importance of plants to Foucault's later History of Sexuality.

This collection also includes contributions from outside of the direct orbit of CRMEP. The pieces by Edward Thornton and Isabel Jacobs were commissioned via a reading group on plant agency organized by Thornton - a group of which Bastie, Worrall and I are also members. As with other, more formalized collaborations, research in CRMEP has developed and expanded thanks to its associations with these kindred groupings. In different ways both Thornton and Jacobs look to the possibilities for an ecological Marxism. Thornton proposes that the metabolic interaction between 'man and nature', as Marx and Engels have it, includes symbiotic relations between humans and technological processes. Jacobs excavates and charts the little-known history of Soviet plant philosophy and proposes its 'morphological materialism' as a vegetal alternative to Soviet-state dialectical materialism.

As we look to the future, from the standpoint of a moment in which the vitality of research in CRMEP is so evident, it is not so much what happens within its current institutional frame but what happens - and will happen - outside or alongside it that provokes us to ask: What is CRMEP? What has it been? and What is it becoming?

CRMEP has led a chequered institutional life. But it has never been reducible to its place within the university and has

always exceeded its institutional ties. It has always retained a strong relative autonomy - which is ultimately, perhaps, what has so irritated the universities within which it has been located. Outside of its participation in state-mandated research competition - notably the REF - it has thrived on its collaborations and the personal and intellectual relations of its members with groups and individuals in other institutions - and kinds of institutions - in other countries and other disciplines. As one after another UK higher educational institution retrenches, and as the government averts its eyes from the ensuing social regression and overall educational diminution of the sector, it is time to ask: What if...?

Another CRMEP is possible. By the time of Volume 8, it will be actual.

Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks to all those friends and colleagues, from many different countries and contexts, who have supported us in so many ways - materially and spiritually - over the years.