“The ecological transition in lack of account”, titled the editorial of the newspaper Le Monde in the aftermath of the presentation on October 21 by the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, of her plan “France Nation Grerte”. “What we have seen for the moment are photos. But the film script is missing, a shared narrative,” said Benoît Leguet Leguet, director of the Institute of the Economy for the Climate, Think Tank on ecological transition.
It is indeed an illusion shared by political circles and the media that to believe that a story can remedy a crisis of civilization which questions not only our consumption modes, but our way of representing reality and to tell it.
Faced with the ecological transition, the narrator president struggles to find the words. Government communication borrows from a lexicon of constraint: “efforts”, “responsibility”, “sacrifice”. The measures announced are formulated in terms of renunciation, deprivation, restrictions. They never borrow the language of experimentation, of invention. There is always a loss (a lifestyle or consumption habits), never reconquest (new spaces, biodiversity). The ecological transition constitutes a burden whose charge should be balanced, a collective responsibility for future generations.
of punitive, ecology would have passed at the expiatory stage. A form of purgatory responsible for buying the faults of hyperconsumption: wild growth and looting of natural resources. We decline restriction measures, never opening, enlargement of experiences, invention of new relationships with body, time and space. It is a question exclusively of the survival of the human species, never reunion with other species. It is only a question of correcting yourself on a daily basis by ecogestes and sobriety, never to deploy on other fields of experience. The ecological catastrophe puts in crisis all the dominant stories, but it fails to offer a horizon of possibilities, it is locked in a feedback loop: story of the disaster, disaster of the story. by the facts
“Life has turned into a timeless suite of shocks between which there are gaping holes, empty and paralyzed intervals,” wrote Adorno in 1945. Twelve years earlier, Walter Benjamin analyzed in a famous essay, Entitled Experience and Poverty, the reasons for the narration crisis which had followed the First World War: “Never experiences acquired [had] been as radically denied as the strategic experience by the war of positions, the economic experience by the ‘Inflation, bodily experience by the test of hunger, the moral experience by the maneuvers of the rulers. “
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