The misfortune is that it is radically false

THE DISSOCIT

by generous Jacques

Ed. Threshold, 445 pages, 22 euros.

The challenges are manifold: an economist who is a work of anthropology and does not hesitate to trample the quicksand of paleontology, Neurobiology and psychoanalysis... A Socialist leader to put in the same bag the political programs of the left and right... An academic who, without hiding anything of his passions, do not ruthless educational rigor divests... A strongly partisan support against neo-liberalism which the height of view will require compliance with any drive.

The target is the neo-liberal culture is steeped in our time. Even if he leaves to go to a description quite terrifying havoc operated by the introduction of widespread competition, even if announced us the advent of the "uncivil war" where the struggle for places is will be substituted for the class struggle, the essential is not for Jacques Généreux: "the problem is not whether this template is good or bad, but whether it is true or false." And it is to demonstrate its radical misrepresentation that the book is dedicated. It is also why the author, convinced that political speech is based, at least by implication, on a theory of human beings, is an archaeology of neoliberalism.

To simplify, let's say that everything is played around the design is the man as a social animal. All of the modern humanities join to confirm our intuition: "We are human beings born of a relationship and development is shaped by a set of relationships with others." Exist is to be by and others. "Nonetheless everyone aspires to be self.

False assumption

Our challenge is to reconcile these two aspirations: be itself and with others. It is here that modern Western thought, with Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau and others left us believe that the individual was responsible for his fate and strictly egocentric original atom. He could not therefore to be predatory for sustenance and to submit to the law of the strongest. If it has created social institutions, is to limit the resulting violence of this law of nature. This is the vision which the neo-liberal doctrine. The misfortune is that it is radically false.

The dramatic result of this false assumption is that our culture is based on the single value of "self" and came to consider the intrusion of others as a threat to the personal achievement. Hence the logical solution: it minimize the weight of the company in our existence, creating a "dissociété", i.e. "a society which punishes or mutilates the desire to be with, to impose the domination of the desire to be self". We're here.

Was Jacques Généreux to dispel a puzzle: how is it that men do not revolt against this dissociété which reduced them to a part of themselves, leads them to the competition rather than cooperation A first explanation would be that the political parties of left, Socialist and Marxist, are also responsible for the dissemination of an atomistic conception of the individual. A close analysis of the Marxist schema shows, indeed, that collectivization to which it tends offers only a different outcome hypersociété to the dilemma of coexistence between self and other. These potential opponents "may not challenge the neo human designs since they are also their". Another explanation is provided by the psychological theory of resilience. When they are retreating to a conflict that overwrites, humans managed to survive in "making". The palette of resilience strategies is broad: narcissistic enjoyment of additional property, withdrawal into the heat of small communities, etc.

Social life is made of the interaction between individuals and the whole of the system they are, Jacques Généreux cannot conclude that using a political commitment to this process of gradual adjustment to continue in any lucidity.