On the Therapeutic Mode in Politics
I.
We find ourselves on the eve of the French primaries. This is always a good time for generalized anxiety, especially as the campaigns traditionally stop some time (Friday) before the voting process starts (Sunday), leaving a strip of discursively barren land, wherein you hold your breath, or make a reflection of dubitable quality and boundless superficiality (I have, as you will doubtlessly notice, chosen the latter). The anxiety partly stems from the somewhat regrettable voting system in place – personally, I know nobody who votes for the person they would actually like to have as president, but instead for the person they consider most likely to keep a worse candidate at bay: you probably know the drill – and mostly from the fact that is kind of unstable system must, once again, shoulder the responsibility of preventing an all-out fascist government.
This is, arguably, a defining trait of French political identity in the 20th and 21st century: As numerous historians have shown – Zeev Sternhell is obviously the most famous proponent – fascism is very much a French product. In Sternhell's view, publicists like Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès cooked up a (at the time) new kind of right-wing extremism with revolutionary tendencies, a spark that a part of French leftism of the time inadvertently helped ignite: those leftists, namely, that, according to Sternhell, wanted socialism, but without Marxism; or wanted Marxism, but without theory. That product was successfully exported to Italy and Spain (with WWI working as a logistical lubricant), but was narrowly kept from full fruition – that is to say: complete executive power – within France itself. In a way, we have never seen fascism in full bloom in its home country – a condition that depends to a considerable extent on the presidential vote.
Now, one could deal in diverse ways with Sternhell’s thesis – either in its formulation, which led to a fierce debate in academia, or in its content. The most obvious and most popular one was, of course, denial: one could claim that Sternhell was wrong and that fascism did, in fact, originate in Italy, and was only a passing shadow on France’s face, a bad import, something you caught while vacationing abroad and then got rid of after a few fits. High-octane denial could even claim that France did exceptionally well, caught as it was between Spanish, German, and Italian fascism, heroically defending civilization against fascist threat. René Rémond, a core figure within French historiography and especially historiography of the right, went as far as to claim an “allérgie française au fascisme”, an allergy against fascism quasi innate to Frenchness (peak irony there, René). A different way of engaging with Sternhell’s thesis was pride (an embracing of their tradition by more recent right-wing extremists in France; indeed, Sternhell’s thesis lent itself quite openly to a perverse nationalism: we, the French peuple, came up with this great thing called fascism), or, a route rather seldom taken, a self-genealogizing of the French political landscape, attacking the denialists and the proud alike, and developing a notion of contemporary France that takes its essential role in the development of modern fascism seriously, which is close to saying that there is a massive, home-made, ingrained problem with French society, a wound constantly dangerously close to bursting open, and ritually inflamed in a five-year-rhythm. Contre Rémond, France, in this view, is not immune to fascism, but a festering infection herd.
One of the problems with all of this is, obviously, that it allows fascism to exert a kind of chokehold on French politics, with every presidential election running the risk of turning into a large-scale institutional formulation of the question “How to defeat fascism this time?” As fascism is only forestalled, never defeated, the state is one of perpetual emergency.
II.
The current executive engagement with the French fascist tendency (and the achiever of its most recent presidential forestalling) is macronisme. It was an engagement, I would argue, characterized by what could tentatively be called a therapeutic mode of politics.
What does it consist of, then? Put in almost illegally crude terms, the therapeutic mode tries to defeat fascism by striving for a healthy collective psyche against the healthy collective body marshaled by right-wing extremism. Where the latter helps itself with generous servings from e.g. immunological imagery – parasites, vermin, bacteria, cesspools, etc. – the hygiene envisioned by the therapeutic mode is associated with psychological and especially psychotherapeutic vocabulary: reconciliation, avowal, recognition, etc. It says: look, these are ruptures going through society, self-actualizing as collective traumata – our unacknowledged, deep-seated fascist tradition, our colonialist crimes, our experience of Islamist terror, etc. – and now we will collectively try and heal. We will restitute what has been stolen; repair what has been broken; mend what has been ruptured; console who has been saddened.
Much has been made of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s tutelage of the young Macron, and a lot of ink been spilt over the question: Just how exactly can we trace Ricoeur’s influence on the current French president – if at all? Is the very establishment of any intellectual connection, let alone causality, a mere figment of macroniste hagiography, empty wish-fulfillment of Macron-supporting intellectuals dreaming of their very own philosopher-prince? But I would argue that this, at least, can be said while neither claiming direct causality nor indulging in celebration: there exists a strong functional similarity between Ricoeur’s reconciliatory philosophy and Macron’s therapeutic mode. Blake Smith’s recent article on Ricoeur, Rocard, and Macron penned for Foreign Policy is in many aspects characteristically questionable (characteristically both for the author and the magazine, which almost forces me to make the pun that, really, every policy remains foreign to the editors), but I fully agree with the following passage:
Ricoeur and Macron attribute a similar role to the concept of political reconciliation, imagined as a means of remembering the past together through official enactments of commemoration and pardon, and, by doing so, achieving civic cohesion.
Smith himself associates this political mode with therapy:
In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur conceives statecraft in symbolic terms: as a matter of managing the commemoration of past injustices; reconciling competing historical narratives; and achieving, through a kind of state-supervised process of national group therapy, reconciliation.
The dynamics of therapy might just require the kind of ideological shifting Macron is famous for; as the political center turns into basically a huge, warm handshake, it must accommodate good and bad fingers alike. The conditions must be constantly shifting in order to feel welcoming for everyone. Liberalism? Yes, “si par libéralisme on entend confiance en l’homme”, in Macron’s words: if liberalism is understood as the trust in man. Revolution? Yes, if the title Révolution can seamlessly accommodate the subtitle Réconcilier la France, that is to say: if it is in no way revolting to anybody.
Please lie down – it is a couch, not a guillotine.
It is certainly not par hazard that one of the most successful cultural products of the Macron era was the French adaptation of the classic Israeli TV series BeTipul, published on Arte in February and March 2021 under the title En thérapie. The series follows a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Philippe Dayan, as he receives five patients on the first four days of the week; on the fifth day, he meets a colleague and talks about this problems, doubts, and fears. Each day represents one episode.
As he treats lovesickness and loneliness, a couple in crisis, a bullied youth, a suicidal sportswoman, or a traumatized policeman, a view of contemporary French society emerges, over which the collective trauma of the 13 November 2015 massacre looms large. The series is exceptionally well written and acted, and its choice of lens is – even though directly taken from the Israeli template – immaculate: It is an essential aspect of contemporary society that it looks at itself through a therapeutic paradigm, the core ideological quality, the characteristic structure of feeling established by macronisme.
In the ideal form it strives for, macronisme would supply a civic organization as neat and well-structured as the format of the series: each day an episode, each episode the addressing of a different pain, with a charming voice to guide you, a voice which, at the end of the week, turns to another voice and confesses its own doubts, gets help itself (is it par hazard that the person the therapist himself turns to, is a woman older than himself?), before the week restarts.
III.
But now, seriously: How could anyone be against this? Civic cohesion is not a bad thing a priori; and surely, a more caring world is exceedingly desirable. Making fun of therapy, meanwhile, is inexcusably stupid.
Yet the problem lies exactly there: it is crucial to see that the therapeutic mode in politics is not caring, at least not necessarily (in macronisme, it sure isn’t). To think that the use of psychotherapeutic discourse in politics equals a psychotherapeutic politics, is to commit the same fallacy as thinking that fascist government will establish the best public health system simply on the grounds that their discourse swarms with hygienic terminology. In fact, an important argument of En thérapie was to show the limits of psychotherapeutic activity even within psychotherapeutic practice – the lingering suspicion, for example, that some things cannot be repaired even by the best therapy imaginable; or the fact that, all the psychotherapeutic vocabulary in political discourse notwithstanding, a true politicization of mental health is still lacking, individual mental states and social conditions remain unlinked, and financial and organizational support for psychotherapeutic professions is laughably meager; all of which limits the abilities of the psychotherapist to help.
Worse: it is not easy to get rid of the suspicion that the therapeutic mode in politics actually exacerbates all of these factors, precisely because the horizon of absolute reconciliation all but diminishes the potential for genuine political action with genuine political results. The center, in macronisme, must, in principle, accommodate everyone and thus must not alienate anybody. From this, two essential methods follow. The first is that every viewpoint must be represented from time to time (for its own episode). Sometimes you will say things to the right of what Le Pen says, because there will be no reconciliation if you consider those people enemies just like they consider you an enemy; sometimes you will say things to the left of what Mélenchon thinks, because otherwise there will be no reconciliation. As long as you do not act on either of the two statements you made, the contradiction is a merely idealist contradiction, politically anemic, and of comparatively little risk: the statement to the right of Le Pen will anger some of those on the left you also want to accommodate, but they will be relieved to see that nothing follows from this. Every three months, you call an anti-Semite an anti-Semite; in turn, every three months, you criticize Le Pen on the grounds that her stance on Islamism is not severe enough.
It is important to pompously announce a report on artworks stolen from African cultures, because you have to recognize their hurt, acknowledge your guilt, enter into dialogue with the Other in geography (Africa) and the Other in time (your past mistakes), work through the trauma, mend the rupture, heal the wound, reconcile. But any radical admission of guilt followed by a radical politics of indebtedness would inevitably alienate large parts of at least the right wing within your country, so the measures you actually take are ridiculous in dimension and pace relative to what the report you commissioned yourself actually says. Therapy, you think, requires that everyone is ready to enter into dialogue, to approach each other, so the Républicains must make the step and acknowledge that yes, artworks of massive value were stolen during a political practice that can only be called large-scale and systematic looting, and the respective African countries must make the step and acknowledge that they’re not getting them back: reconciliation.
This, then, is the dark underside of the therapeutic mode: it is squarely unable to imagine a wound that cannot be healed, or a rupture that cannot be mended; and this inability is its carelessness.
Ricoeur's politics, careless in themselves, could be characterized as an attempt at having socialism without Marxism ("gauche non-dogmatique", as this sort of thought likes to be called). Macron's political philosophy has been described as "peut-être en partie «du» Ricœur, mais sans le socialisme". Does the fact of a socialism without Marxism, but without socialism ring a bell in Sternhell-trained ears?
I hope it rings without echo.