Kenneth White : and the Poetics of Energy : revitalization, writing, world ; Kenneth White : et la poétique de l'énergie : épure, écriture, monde

Abstract

Since the 1960's Scotto-French poet, essayist and prose-writer Kenneth White has been elaborating an idiosyncratic work which is today recognised as one of the most coherent of post-modernity. Because he believes that western culture has reached a point of no return, he sees the earth as the only solution to our civilization's discontents. Resolutely nietzschean in his approach, he dismisses transcendence to embrace immanence, deconstructs the vertical axis on which the western world had built itself and endeavours to revitalize the journey of man on earth. Together with this process of purge he reflects on the Word and tries to find the unknown language our mind longs to master. Against literature that is too literary, White's writing is simple and supple, powerful and vivifying. The author does not draw his inspiration from mythology but gets in tune with the earth, with its telluric forces, its thermodynamic envelopes, its vibrations and wavelengths, with what Caillois, before him, called the "permanent writing of the world". Despite this undermining White does not wipe the slate clean and meets a large number of fellow writers and thinkers on his way. As a matter of fact he pushes this logic to its end and insists on the fact that one should no longer think in terms of personal work and should strive to create a collective one. By founding the International Institute for Geopoetics in 1989 and by "archipelising" it in 1994, he clearly stressed the social vocation of literature. Between avant-garde and rearguard, politics and aesthetics, geopoetics opens new perspectives and traces the outline of a highly energetic world. ; Le poète, essayiste et prosateur franco-écossais Kenneth White élabore depuis le début des années 1960 une œuvre singulière qui est aujourd'hui reconnue comme l'une des plus cohérentes de la post-modernité. Parce qu'il considère que la culture occidentale est prise dans une impasse, il cherche dans un contact rapproché avec la terre l'issue au malaise dans la civilisation. Selon une ...