Burning Barns: Poetics of Fire in Planetary Souths

Abstract

Burning Barns:Poetics of Fire in Planetary Souths Christopher Thouny (bio) In his last book, published in 1961 and titled La flamme d'une chandelle (The Flame of a Candle), the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard reflected on the aesthetic quality of the element of fire and its potential to generate beautiful, fragile, and open images of dwelling. Fire, he argued, can allow us to see the beautiful anywhere anytime. It can allow for a "pancalist vision" in which "the flame is a world for the lonely human" (1988, 23).1 Bachelard passed away the following year, leaving us with this delicate and paradoxical image of dwelling. How are we to understand this last text about an isolated and lonely aesthetic of dwelling in a global world always on the brink of global and civil war, a world torn between a Global North and what I call in this article "planetary souths." How are we to read this text, then and today, about a poetics of fire defined by "the flame that leaps above itself to continue burning" (1988, 46),2 making us wonder whether it is better to last, or burn entirely? And what does such an image of fire have to say about Asia, at the crossroads of the Global North and planetary souths? For these planetary souths are not defined by a binary opposition (symmetrical or supplementary) to the Global North, as the usual concept of Global South implies, but by an intensification of place experiences articulated by singular images of dwelling that resonate with each other—here, burning barns.3 As Bachelard explains, a poetics of fire is ultimately about figuring dwelling experiences in terms of another mode of communication, a communion of imaginations that is non-psychological and non-social and can thus allow any object to disclose anytime anywhere a vision of the beautiful. In this sense, the Heideggerian opposition between dwelling as sheltering and actual buildings does not hold. For dwelling becomes here a question of communication, and thus of movement: it is a historical relation that takes the form of a mediation in place, mediation on fire.4 A poetics of fire is a dwelling practice: it allows reveries to generate new dwelling experiences when attached to an image of fire. In other words, fire can actualize for an instant world-making reveries in which any object can become the germ of a world, be it the lighted candle of Bachelard's [End Page 135] text or the barns burning in the three texts discussed in this article, William Faulkner's 1939 short story "Barn Burning," Haruki Murakami's 1984 rewriting of Faulkner's story in postmodern Japan, and Chang-dong Lee's 2018 movie adaptation of both stories relocated in Korea, Burning. As I read together these three iterations of the figure of burning barns, I argue that these images of fire articulate a return to planetary souths, in the fringes of the Global North and its paranoid and racist logic of survival and risk control.5 Planetary Souths Then and today, fire is all over the news, leaping across the North and the South, from fires in California, Australia, or France to slash-and-burn agriculture in Thailand and Malaysia, from the devastating 2015 Tianjin explosions to the fall 2020 destruction of the Beirut harbor, from wartime bombings of Germany and Japan to 1960s napalm fires in Vietnam. Fire is a relay between the North and the South, and more importantly, between planetary souths. "Planetary" here designates neither a particular object closed on itself, such as "the Earth" on which we dwell, nor a geographical location, for it is first about how anyplace always already relates to anyplace anytime anywhere, from the microscopic to the cosmic and vice versa. For this reason, the planetary is not a question of scale, as is usually claimed, and thus is not the opposite of the Global as such. This means, as I will show in this article, that planetary souths are not a geographical place that could be opposed to the Global North following a center/periphery model, but rather a curving, a clinamen, in place. I started thinking about Bachelard's poetics of...