There is a part of the world, ours, where not so much power but one’s sensibility creates a despotic order and a circumscription of reality. What is new is that in stable democratic societies there is no longer a violent and even bloody struggle to change a reality imposed on subjects – as in many other parts of the planet – but rather that reality is erased and reset and reformulated around it to adapt to a gentle, indignant sensibility. Anything that doesn’t fit this over-sensitivity of offense disguised as a moral requirement is denounced, persecuted, made to disappear, abolished.
Although there are many tyrannical governments in the world, power in western democracies tries to soften its face, it does not want to present itself as the dominating leviathan. And as governments secretly try to cloak their authoritarianism, we see it growing where there was hope for rebellion: among individuals.
For a long time two opposite poles were considered: on the one hand individuals; on the other hand, the power that annulled them. It then examined the unconscious ways in which people introject this power and obey the rules without realizing it, with the vain illusion of being free.
It was mostly the dictatorships that imposed repression, although the rules could largely be adopted by the subjects in “voluntary servitude”. Oppression (not just sexual) has been sublimated with moral, religious, or social justifications: it seems, then, that desublimation should lead us to true freedom. But Herbert Marcuse already coined the term “repressive desublimation” to show how supposed coercion nests under supposed freedom. Festive hypersexualization does not free us from today’s diverse, desirable, and inclusive normativity with which the map of its truth is being drawn.
The famous pamphlet Outrage! by Stéphane Hessel, 15-M, even the gruff gesture of Greta Thunberg suggested an uprising against a hostile, unjust, predatory world… all this seems to dissolve in an offended narcissism plagued by censorship, persecution and cruelty, in which emotion replaces Reason.
The taking of the Bastille or the conquest of the Winter Palace have become ancient symbols of this overthrow of absolutism, they have been the subject of revolutions fueled by theories (Enlightenment, Marxism). Sentimentality is currently replacing the theoretical framework, and the aim is not to achieve social change, but rather to compensate for the injured identity. It should not modify reality, but invent it, correct it retrospectively and force public and legal consent to this cleaning: the new normality as a collective psychosis of political correctness.
The waking culture performs the following translation: I feel offended, then there is real insult (jump from feeling to objectivity), any contradiction is a display of hate (reasoning is rejected), then those who insult me in this way deserve it too be canceled (I don’t hate, I fix wrongs says the canceller).
We experience an omnipotence of desire that annihilates those who do not show the needed correction and, on the other hand, a manipulation of guilt. We will never be able to do justice to those who belong to – or try to present themselves as – an oppressed group, their legacy of humiliation means that every word can reopen the wound, it is not possible to speak , to argue, but to show solidarity with their oppression, to forgive us for belonging to the group of oppressors.
In addition to the personal dramas that the “outlander” can suffer, I think it’s important to point out an essential consequence: the outlandish culture, and beyond that, the falsified culture. All the books and movies that are no longer recommended because they contain elements that are now banned. What’s more, HBO, for example, not only dropped Gone with the Wind from its catalogue, but also chose a black actress as Anne Boleyn in its eponymous miniseries, much like Garth Davis wishes in his film Mary Magdalene Turns St. Peter into a Black Man. Is this the effective way to overcome racism? And with other improprieties, will we hide artworks, revive the index of banned books, or just rewrite a few paragraphs? Why not critical contextualization instead of censorship?
The real doesn’t matter, it’s imperfect, my desire must prevail – thinks the new censoring Narcissus. We change the past, body, nature. Feeling creates rights, laws, reality. This is the background of the awakened, inscribed in what Michel Foucault called the “regime of truth” – or fiction – of our time.
We lose reality, history and turn culture into a story for scared and spoiled children who cannot take the slightest scratch but can crush those who do not share their vision.
We must prepare to survive the cotton-wrapped daggers.
Rosa Maria Rodríguez Magda She is a philosopher and author. Author of, among others, The Angry Woman. Postgender Feminisms and Transgender Sexual Identity.
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