Introduction: Scotland in France; France in Scotland

his own activities: thus in his autobiography, Between Two Worlds, 2 geopoetics is compared with 'ecology', and is described as a notion that 'goes back farther, into a more general background, and opens up larger perspectivesexistential, intellectual, cultural' ('Song of the South', Chapter 8, 132), and the very title of the autobiography re-uses a phrase from the essay 'Meditations in the Atlantic Library', in which he describes his trajectory as 'a movement, existential and intellectual, between two worlds' (CW, Vol. 2, 459).The positive content of post-war existentialism is not the Sartrean intellectuel engagé who, in White's view, is limited by a commitment to 'immediate social engagement, often hastily and blindly', but in existentialism's original emphasis on selfdiscovery through action, on the fact, as Sartre suggests when 'attacking the notion of a purely contemplative consciousness', 3 that 'perception is naturally surpassed toward action; better yet, it can be revealed only in and through projects of action.The world is revealed as an "always future hollow" for we are always future to ourselves'. 4 The travels recorded in White's 'waybooks' and essays are not contemplative or spectatorial but consciousness in action, a 'territorial investigation and existential wayfaring' ('Heritage and Role of a European Writer', CW, Vol. 2, 315) that does not simply encounter the world but, like White's intellectual nomad, 'has broken his way out of the labyrinth and moves in what may at fi rst seem a void, but which is perhaps the high energy fi eld in which could emerge a (new) world' ('Minds in Movement', CW, Vol. 2, 488).It is on the basis of its demand for existential action that White distinguishes geopoetics from the works of theorists such as Barthes and Derrida, whom he sees as trapped, even in the mode of deconstruction, in a 'science of textuality' ('Ideas of Order at Cape Wrath', CW, Vol. 2, 300), which encourages a positioning and re-positioning but can never break through to a new and different relationship to the world.The French theory of the midand late-twentieth century are most valuable, in the end, because they provide a route back to more fundamental thinking in the work of 'Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger' (Working in the Outer Reaches', CW, Vol. 2, 297).Nonetheless, White came to be identifi ed as an intellectuel engagé in his early years in France, losing his university post as a result of his public support 2The English version of Entre deux mondes: autobiographie (Marseille: Le Mot et le Reste, 2021) is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press as Volume 3 of White's Collected Works; references include Chapter details but the page numbers are anticipated rather than actual.