Intimate, a political concept

The challenge of Michaël Foessel’s book is to clear, delimit and promote, alongside the public and private spheres to which modern and contemporary political theories are limited, the sphere of “ intimate ». If it is important to take the measure of this sphere, it is because it involves specific experiences about the mode of relationship, visibility and responsibility between individuals. In the classic dichotomous scheme, these experiences are too often confused with those that run in the private field, while the latter is exclusively in the economic field and reports on individual relationships on the model of transactions between owners (of self, their body), including within the couple and the family. On the contrary, taken in its specificity, the intimate allows us to think of another approach to politics – according to a double dimension.

Normative dimension first: intimate and the public share common structures and standards which distinguish them, together, from the private sector: this is particularly the case, in the “ democratization of intimate “(According to the expression of Giddens), of the progressive imposition of the idea according to which personal life is a” open project And not hidden or silent. In the couple taken as “ Ethical development place “(P. 39), partners are not thought of as co-contractors with first social and legal links, but as the supporters of self-discourse that only make sense in the relationship, taking the risk of self-disappointment. From this point of view, focusing on thinking about the specificity of the intimate makes it possible to get rid of the error which consists in folding the political from the economic. Thus can emerge from another way of thinking about politics and its actors, emotional individuals and not only efficient individuals, taken in a “ live together “Whose modalities, sentimental and moral, are also renewed.

From there follows the second dimension, practical and positive: the intimate gives us access to an overly ignored part of democracy, democracy “ sensitive “(P. 138) – In the double sense of a democracy of feelings and a vulnerable democracy, that it is precisely to protect against the intrusion of the private or from the exclusively social interpretation of identities and interactions. The political link is the institutionalization of human passions and, to maintain the delicate balance between norms and affects, it is important that democracy admits its sensitivity to “ pure relations (P. 140). Mr. Foessel then finds the analyzes of the theories of recognition, in particular that of Axel Honneth, when he underlines how much what is played out in the first sphere of recognition, that of love (too often neglected as a political feeling), is founder not only personal relationships but also political ties (p. 125 and SQ.).

The book thus pursues a double objective: that of first, epistemic, led in the first and second parts, of a diagnosis and then of a genealogy of the intimate. This approach allows both to grasp the meaning of the intimate and the effect of the confusion that accompanies its “ deprivation », His oblivion or ignorance in political philosophy. Be deprived of intimate, for us, individuals-political actors, commits us to compensate for this lack by an investment always already distorted in the private sphere. Thus, in the third part, the second objective, practical: we are invited to be wary of the staging of feelings by professional political actors, who play conceptual confusion and denials of recognition that affect individuals in their daily life to promote their own public career, thought like that of entrepreneurs of themselves. They display a love “ successful “, Efficient, legitimized in this practice by the general dissolution of intimate in strategic rationality. It is in the name of a search for authentic that the political attitude of distrust, both philosophical and committed, must be adopted.

The three parts of the book, “ Intimate at the borders of public space “,” Invention of intimate ” And “ Intimate and democracy “, Are separated by two” interluded Which is not so much a break, a resumption of the breath before the attack of a new theme, as a deepening of two essential concepts to the argument of Mr. Fœssel, allowing, according to the injunction of Beaumarchais in connection with the intercourse games, “ support, without tiring it, the attention of spectators », By showing them to see the cogs of the action – what is happening behind the curtain. This is an opportunity, for Mr. Fœssel, to specify the philosophical intention that he pursues beyond the “ Pipolization of politics (P. 8). If the book is of clear access, a clear language and a great vivacity of words, it nevertheless intends to reveal, behind a society, a deep theoretical diversion which strikes contemporary liberal political practices. Indeed, the “ pipolization Is this controlled and contractual self -staging practice in which Mr. Foessel sees the paradigm of the neoliberal tendency to dissolve the public and the intimate in the private sphere.

The first interlude is devoted to deepening and re -situating the concept of authenticity from the analyzes of Rousseau and Heidegger. According to Mr. Fœssel, it must be understood as “ Powerful critical instrument “, On condition of using its explanatory and not normative function: it then allows, not to invoke a lost origin of which the present would only be a false reflection, but to designate” the existence of a link between the subject and his truth (P. 61). This does not necessarily mean that this truth is easily accessible, but that a critical attitude cannot do without it. Such a use of the concept goes far beyond the economic recovery of the ideal of authenticity which claims to make a successful life in social terms an authentic life and, thereby, is mistaken “ Me “: It is the intimate which represents a possible object for the morals of authenticity of which” This book would like to be a reasonable defense (P. 62).

The second interlude continues to question the nature of the “ Me »Homo yeconomicus that thematizes liberal individualism, from a reading ofAdolphe of Benjamin Constant, “ novel of the disappearance of the intimate in the “private” (P. 100). Adophe, confusing the ideal of authenticity and the imperative of success, misses his loves and his life by remaining foreign to others, incapable of commitment – which according to Mr. Fœssel, is the inevitable counterpart of the negative freedom of the Moderns. Indeed, liberal modernity tears the intimate from the normative constraint of tradition, but commits in the same movement the error of conceptualizing it in terms of “ right to privacy »» ; gold “ the private we belongs While intimate we concerned (P. 111). Here is the essential confusion which leads us to forget to act according to the authentic concern for oneself. We are thus led to take to “ Me What is exposed like me and which is only taken in a strategic logic: the transparency given in spectacle replaces the authenticity of an intimate exchange of glances. This authentic gift of self to others, which Mr. Fœssel invites us to dare, can only flourish in a liberating opacity, a new visibility regime which aims to renew the liberal standard. Indeed, it is not simply a question of respecting the space “ private “, Apart from the public sphere, as the place in which the State does not have to intervene, but more radically to accept that the ego escapes any possibility of rational communication of oneself, that the ego is no longer” The perfectly transparent source of his desires, identified with “projects” (P. 141). Make this self, disoriented to the other, the source of the mobilization of the us, amounts to making the intimate a political concept and its preservation a political objective (p. 153): the ambivalence and vulnerability of modern democracy is measured beyond its contractual tendency.