Contemporary Ecosophical Lyricism : Lyricism of Resistance and Lyrical Criticism of Philosophy in Pierre Vinclair and Jean-Philippe Pierron
This paper shows, through a comparison of the essays on ecopoetics published in 2020 by Jean-Philippe Pierron and Pierre Vinclair, how the inclusion of ecological issues in literature reconfigures some of the traditional distinctions of literary theory. Although they both start from the same critique of instrumental rationalism and find in the lyrical tradition the means of a resistance through writing to the ecological crisis that this rationalism would have provoked, the two authors end up implementing two diametrically opposed poetics (a naive lyricism capable of expressing the subject and its living connections in Jean-Philippe Pierron’s case, a critical lyricism that is anti-propositional and conscious of its methods in Pierre Vinclair’s case). However, the paper hypothesizes that the ecosophical perspective of these poetics leads to a relativization of their opposition rather than to a hierarchy of approaches. Indeed, insofar as all ecosophy is based on an ontology that refuses to make man an empire within an empire, literature can no longer be thought of in terms of natural expression or conscious artifice : it becomes a form of life, consisting of experience and in the continuity of an experience that is first and foremost that of a living being.