Time policy

Viewed as the art of the necessary, politics has long been reduced to power relations. Today, it is temporality, more precisely a “ climatology », That is to say a study of the time he does or what men do inside time. Contemporary politics then becomes the sphere of actions on the horizon of human time, which is either good weather (favorable to the community) or bad weather (the time of the crisis unfavorable to the common good). Two of the largest living thinkers have recently tried to rethink again for politics. In this text, we will present the important contributions of Peter Sloterdijk (2007) and Daniel Innerarity (2008) to the problem of what is agreed to call “ Time policy ».

As a response to Heidegger

In Anger and timeSloterdijk wants to see the history of the West as a angry response to the silence of mortals. The first lines of theIliadon Achilles’ anger against his destiny, will mark Europe: the world is to be understood as the sum of the fights that must be fought against him. In response to the deadly time, the West is then trained in the manufacture of heroes. Sloterdijk’s response to the Heidegger to Be and time (1927) is clear: being no longer interpreted as time, it is time that is anger and the reservoir of the anger of men. To show it, the essay of psychopolitics of Sloterdijk has the task of drawing the portrait, in 300 pages, of Western history as avatar of the anger of Achilles. Anger (thymós) is for Sloterdijk engine of time and actor of the politician. This thymós To this ability to transform into history. He can spread, but also accumulate and manage himself in time by political regimes. It can, in other words, channel itself by ideologies, to escape and become a “ bank The one that will be used for revenge and revolutions.

Anger as a psychopolitical element

The prolific German author understood that anger is more important than love in human power and that it is movement in becoming. It trains projects and feeds on social heat. In Western politics, there are therefore the cold times of waiting and organization, and the warm times of war and revolution. As we can see: the economy of anger is a matter of time – religious reformers, like the French revolutionaries, Lenin and Mao for example, used time to excite the thymós (The Foyer of the Self as a place of pride) Devafuned in order to create a structure reversal.

Modern politics as time of the Revolution and its limits

If Sloterdijk, in an original reader of Nietzsche, is the first author to note this phenomenon of anger as a psychopolitical engine, it does not go so far as to say that the politician is interpretation of time as a climate. Instead of associating the two meanings of the word “ time – Time as a course and time as an external atmosphere – in order to identify its political potential, there is still the historical expression of the forms of anger. Despite his powerful advances, he dares not take the direction of political climatology, because his task remains that of describing this anger as a political force. On the one hand, he has seen that militancy is a configuration of anger and time of action, it does not hear, on the other, to present the climatology it always supposes. He has seen that Jewish and Christian anger are political affairs, that the economic paradigm is behind any revolution as administration of the thymósthat we accumulate in time and place the energy forces of the angry drive and that resentment and revenge are at the heart of historical events ; However, he does not borrow the track of time as a chronopolitical of the social, which constitutes a station of the program that Innerarity is essential in The future and its enemies. Innerarity, we will see it below, will try to present the policy of time by studying the government of social rhythms.

His reading of the phenomenon of the political revolution is undoubtedly rich and intoxicating. The author is undoubtedly right to see in the Revolution the political project of a past era, that of young modernity where we organized the life of men in view of the realization of ideas of freedom and truth in the terror of time and history. Today, we no longer arouse the pride of the humiliated, we no longer criticize the bourgeoisie and the pure fury of Mao’s time (Sloterdijk sees in the great cultural revolution a collective of resentment, an attempt at the excessive mobilization of the people) is far behind us, since we live in individualism, frightened capitalism and the inasouvia research. Contemporary activism can therefore no longer take the form of the angry body.

Sloterdijk continues to “ think Political time when he writes that the permanent agitation of society for mobilization ends is a political war and that this time seems to be over. When he seeks to grasp and overcome our time with his “ After theory », This does not prevent him from showing the limits of a capitalism of greed. However, despite all his genius, the author of Spheres does not manage to clearly conceive the role of the media as manufacturers of political time. Obsessed with the thymós (which is anger, pride and strength) like Plato, he never embarks on the path of the creation of the social conditions of power. To better think about this limit, reading the Future and its enemies of innerarity can be very useful.

Confront and criticize the tyranny of the present

In his latest work translated into French, the Spanish philosopher Daniel Innerarity continues his study of democracies. His question is as follows: how, in our short -term political systems, take the future seriously ? Because if democracy has never had good relations with the future, it is urgent to propose a new theory of social time at the height of our time. We must therefore accept to reflect on the structure of socio -political time, the culture of performance and the “ Just in time Which still determine our political choices.

To get out of the tyranny of the present, the author attacks the bad rhetoric of the future, that which makes the future an unimportant triviality. If it is true that forecasts of futureology often fail, it does not mean that it is necessary to turn their backs in the future. On the contrary, these failures of current forecasts and diagnoses on the future invite us to think differently about the needs of a policy of hope, that is to say a rational hope that does not give in to the attractions of unrealizable utopia ?

Thwart the confiscation of our future

The intuition of innerarity consists in wondering if our systems are able to anticipate, today, the possibilities of the future in a context of crisis and uncertainty. If Sloterdijk describes our time as that of anger that no longer has the means of once to organize, Innerarity characterizes our time like that where media work freezes us in the present. While Sloterdijk can recognize a confiscation of anger by war borrowings which will generate totalitarian regimes (he gives the example of the revolution of 1917), Innerarity denounces the confiscation of the future in the disease of the present. The world of consumption, maidening according to Sloterdijk, is the one where politics goes second to innerarity. Presentism devoid of any perspective threatens our future. Let us think of electoral periodization and the refusal to commit to climate change. If the future requires a lot and that it is necessary to avoid its “ confiscation “(Depending on the subtitle), it is because any increase in speed is accompanied by a proportional reduction in the scope of the vision. Social time accelerates and diachronies limit our power to act collectively. This is why you have to think otherwise and with other words political. Against the ephemeral, Innerarity offers a “ time -consuming Who will take into account that the company remains an essay and that this test also involves the possibility of its failure.

The chapter II Sums by an admission of the author: politics cannot be based on divination because the prospective required by politics calls for knowledge. In a complex world, you have to innovate by unfolding possibilities. The Spanish thinker meets the German thinker here since meeting the “ irritating – The problems that we thought we had defeated – imply the end of revolutionary ideals: the revolutions are no longer on the agenda of the simple fact that their time chronopolitics no longer corresponds to the political art of postmodern societies. If Sloterdijk criticizes the idea of ​​sovereignty, Innerarity is more rational and above all more careful: we will still need a state to structure our decisions in a world where, often, we believe that there is nothing more to decide (p. 87).

The urgency of establishing a “ time -consuming »»

The following chapter is the most interesting for us since the author delivers the lineaments of a time time, that is to say a temporality of social rhythms. Because if the speed of the social represents a threat to democracy, politics must rethink the “ time government (P. 91). The time of political power is for example that of conflict and war. The author seems to go beyond the story of Sloterdijk which remains in the drive, because he insists that “ the one who controls time has power (P. 92). The strongest is today the one who knows how to impose his agenda. Reader of Foucault and Luhmann, Innerarity understood that the modern scene is that of the internalization of constraints and that suffering comes from diachronies. While social rhythms are bursting (time creates inequalities to use Rousseau’s word), the challenge consists in thwarting the polychronies that attack, in the name of personal interests, in the common good.

Polychronies, post -heroic time and new hope

Where Sloterdijk is limited to the organization of thewill goInnerarity specifies that heterochronies (the time of the car is not the time of public transport, the virtual time of the Internet is not the time of waiting in the hospital, etc.) break the social, which explains why the big planned anger are rare today. The counter-democracy progresses due to multiple breaks in social time, which does not prevent us from formulating another hope. If democracy aims at the collective good and total synchrony is no longer possible (innerarity seems to accept the observation of Sloterdijk for whom political resentment will soon reach its limits), it is necessary to build together a post -heroic society for which the time of resentment is finished and for the description of the society in which we wish to live is the affair of all. This company will no longer be able to save an interpretation that rallies the past to the present and the future. The time policy that awaits us will be the one that, sensitive to changes in political climate, will want to go beyond the basic element of Sloterdijk psychopolitics (revenge anger), while accepting at the same time the urgency of a chronolopolitics intended to structure our hope of the common good.