For the director of the culture and creation department of the Pompidou center, the sadness we feel at the disappearance of animals and trees does not prevent action, quite the contrary.
par Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, director of the culture and creation department of the Center Pompidou
It was three years ago. In a blog post from Diplomatic worldthe philosopher and economist Frédéric Lordon delivered a fierce indictment against the way in which biodiversity issues find their way into current thinking, art and public debate. He suspected an intellectual fraud in the efforts of philosophers to conceptualize life differently. (“Until now, they were more or less biologists and zoologists”), and interpreted the attention to these subjects in places of arts and creation as a way of exchanging the fight against the effects of capitalism for a form of blackmail of emotion.
Beyond the necessary criticism of greenwashing, Lordon saw in this attention to forms of life an alibi and a powerful vector of depoliticization, replacing the balance of power with this universal affection that plants and animals arouse. The title of the note, “Whipping the living” was funny and nasty, even if the slight bit of virilism that tinged this stigmatization of “sentimentality” should have raised more alarm.
Three years later, in fact: we can hardly hold back our tears. On November 1, during the 16th Biodiversity COP organized in Cali, twelve days of discussion and twelve hours in plenary session did not lead to any agreement on the financing and evaluation of the measures – or even the observation of disagreement, since it was the departure of numerous delegations in the early morning which led to the interruption of the debates, in front of an assembly of representatives which had become as sparse as the ecosystems which it should have preserved.
Three days later, the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States reminds us, among other perils, that his first term was marked by the cancellation of multiple aspects of the Endangered Species Act, a law promulgated in 1973 and become a benchmark in environmental protection. At the same time, the collapse of biodiversity is tirelessly documented – the latest version of the “Living Planet” report published by the WWF reassesses upwards the loss of abundance of wild life since the 1970s, and the The International Union for Conservation of Nature announces that one tree in three, the equivalent of 15,000 species, is threatened with extinction.
Crying animals and trees? As we said during the fight against AIDS, some bereavements are political through and through. The election of Trump clearly underlines that there is no choice between paying attention to living things and actively contesting the societal choices that make this planet uninhabitable, and which are supported by powerful economic interests. On the other hand, as Judith Butler recalled during her recent intellectual invitation to the Pompidou Center, grief is a powerful vector for demanding justice as long as we stop opposing sensitivity and mobilization, art and knowledge, renewal of our imaginations and increase in our collective lucidity. To cry, finally, is not only to deplore, but to act if, to put it in the words of the writer Rebecca Solnit the day after the election in the United States “Whatever we can save is worth saving.”
Crying together like Björk mixing her voice with the cries of the animals on the stairs of Beaubourg, is not a way of hiding our faces: it is another way of having our eyes open.
