S'inspirer, respirer From the Loire to the Elysée: is a revival of political imagination possible?

As France prepares to elect its new president in three months, no common narrative seems to unite the citizens. Beyond the traditional political divisions that oppose them, undermined by the endless health crisis, the French seem to be crossed by the crisis of the idea of progress, by the mourning of any principle of hope.
Faced with this crisis of the future, we can nevertheless identify counter-fires launched by those who intend to rearm their progressivism today, and try to give time air again in the face of the stopped clocks of modernity. In response to the breakthrough of reactionary, declinist and identity-based discourses, it is still possible to stand against the tide of the times.

At a time when environmental mobilization is striving to install the motif of the Anthropocene as a new age of the Earth, it has never been more urgent to ask ourselves how progressivism can listen to the new beats of time. The question of sharing the Earth is indeed the great contemporary question. It is political, but it is also philosophical, in the sense that it requires a revision of many things we took for granted. Our true condition is no longer the human condition, but the earth condition, as suggested by many current thinkers, from Bruno Latour to Patrice Maniglier.

As the writer and thinker Camille de Toledo invites us to do, « we must listen to the knowledge that has emerged in a new season of the natural sciences », in order to point out something in our time that has to do with an « Indian horizon of modernity ». What the most stimulating world of thought today tells us is how much we are the heirs of a XXth century that « frighteningly denied the links to the places », to the nature, to the wild world…, in the name of great political schemes now outdated. Our time, in spite of the low politicians who saturate the public debate, requires imagination. What our new century demands is a reconfigured political scene; another scene for politics and law, so that everyone becomes aware of what Camille de Toledo calls a « legal earthly uprising in progress ». In a fascinating political and intellectual experiment, recently published in a book, Le fleuve qui voulait écrire, les auditions du Parlement de Loire, the author, surrounded by numerous thinkers, sought to listen to a river, the Loire, in order to imagine how ecosystems, animal and plant life, can achieve the status of « legal persons ». This already exists in other countries (New Zealand, Canada, Ecuador…). The challenge is to go beyond the old partition between human subjects and non-human objects, in order to create a new ontology, where rivers, lakes, oceans, forests, animal and plant species, will be able to plead their causes and write with us the terms of our common life.

This new institutional design, this way of inventing another political science – an eco-political science -, where natural entities will gradually enter our courts and assemblies to assert their rights, many authors are working on it today, as reminded at the Lyon Biennial in 2019 by thinkers filmed by Aliocha Imhoff and Kantuta Quiros in a video entitled « And what are they asking? To become something there ». What would happen if, at the end of an ecological revolution, those who « conjugate verbs in silence » – the plants, the animals, the forests – those who act on us as much as we act on them would in turn officially enter politics? This work invited a rethinking of enunciative politics and poetics. As if the Estates General of 1789 were updated today, not only against privileges, but for a welcome of all beings that inhabit the world.

Imagining other narratives, not utopian narratives, but « topical narratives, which start from places and return to places », inventing other forms of assemblies, re-launching the political imagination: what if the stakes of the presidential elections were to be played out in this gesture, at the margin of the dominant narratives?