Senancour, an ecopoetics of the natural

Abstract

In Senancour's work, the ecopoetics of the natural can be deployed in two directions: in a more poetic and generic perspective (in what way Oberman is a natural novel, for example) and in a more stylistic perspective, which will be emphasized in this study. The natural style is a challenge and almost a contradiction in terms. However, in Senancour's time, two meanings seem to compete: on the one hand, the idea that the natural would be linked to a logic of spontaneous sensation, on the other hand, that it would have to do with the manifestation of an undifferentiated order of reason: singularity or universality. Senancour seems to opt for a singular universal, a naturalness of the environment which renders both the undifferentiated order of nature and the singular spontaneity of natural sensation. The interpellation of feeling and apprehension by judgement thus compose the descriptive evocations as harmonies of the opposites. Better still, Senancour brings this harmony into play within the very heart of sensation: if sight carries this part of the logical order of the painting as a form of objective and almost anaesthetized intellectual evidence, hearing spontaneously manifests the irruption of what is felt as a pure natural sensation.