Review of Pascal Bruckner's latest book, I suffer therefore I am. Portrait of the victim as hero , Paris, Grasset, 2024, 318 p.

Pascal Bruckner's latest book tackles a crucial issue in our contemporary world: the victimhood narrative that has gradually permeated all Western societies, from the feverish focus on memory that gripped Emmanuel Macron's last terms in office to the proliferation of victimhood entrepreneurs that many neo-feminist, anti-racist, pro-Palestinian, and LGBTQ organizations have become. The author speaks of a process of heroizing the victim and the indefinite expansion of the victimhood narrative, where even "the privileged can play the victim." To paraphrase the leftist rhetoric that speaks of a "convergence of struggles," there is, under the sway of workerism, a genuine convergence of victimhood suffering of all kinds. Grievance studies on American campuses are flourishing and have put in place a continuous extension of the fight against all suffering reclassified as "aggressions" and "microaggressions" which zealous DEI ( Diversity, Equity, Inclusion ) departments hunt down in the slightest of their manifestations… In France, at the university and in society, this large-scale victimization process continues to progress.

For Pascal Bruckner, this rapid spread was made possible by the change in our attitude toward suffering. The Enlightenment had established the belief in a better world free from fatalism and fanaticism, and in 1794, a few months before being guillotined, Saint-Just could proclaim: “Happiness is a new idea in Europe.” Today, this idea seems to have been abandoned, and a veritable “society of complaint and lamentation” is taking hold. As Max Scheler analyzed as early as 1923 (in *The Man of Resentment *), resentment has become the dominant passion of modern humanitarianism. In a society of constant solicitude, every effort becomes a source of pain, and a veritable market of affliction flourishes. In Pascal Bruckner's analysis, we find an echo of Michel Schneider's study on the welfare state transformed into a Big Mother ( Big Mother: Psychopathology of Political Life, 2002) in the face of infantilized citizens driven by multiple resentments. The Republic becomes compassionate, and commiseration is an integral part of civic duty and social life. Society then becomes a "great tribe of the stigmatized." Everyone repeats the litany of the slave and the colonized. The "dominated" are everywhere, and the condition of being dominated is not only a source of income to be exploited but also becomes hereditary: "Wretched of the earth could become a hereditary profession," exclaims Pascal Bruckner on page 85 of his book. Faced with so much documented and accumulated misfortune, our societies are no longer capable of either rejoicing or coping, since all misfortune is now an injustice…

Our Western societies are riddled with multiple victim-based competitions. For example, today more and more "thieves of suffering" are seeking to confiscate the notion of "genocide" for their own benefit. A neologism invented in 1943 by the jurist Raphaël Lemkin to account for the process of physical and biological destruction that was the Shoah, the capture of the legacy of the genocide by multiple movements is analyzed by Pascal Bruckner as stemming from a desire where the Jew becomes the rival to be brought down and the Shoah a "screen crime that must be stolen from those who claim it" (p. 96). This wild appropriation is evident in the overuse of the notion of genocide by organizations supporting the Palestinians fighting against the IDF in the Gaza Strip. But the author identifies the same appropriation in decolonial thought where "colonialism and slavery are considered the equivalent of the programmed extermination of a people." The Holocaust is thus minimized in the long history of Western imperialism. The colonial sin is then indelible. The refrain about colonization becomes a stock-in-trade rooted in an eternal victim posture and the author notes, for example, on Algeria: "How much longer are we going to pay for the mistakes of colonization when Turkey, which occupied Algeria for three centuries, owes no duty of remembrance!" (p. 188). More than sixty years after his country's independence, the Algerian President, Abdelmajid Tebboune, still speaks of "the policy of extermination carried out by the colonizer."

Hitler becomes the truth of France and more broadly of the West and this is how Putin "Nazifies" the Ukrainians and, more trivially, this is how the white man is accused in the notion of "gynocide" of a real "patriarchal mass crime" committed for centuries. On page 194 of his book, Pascal Bruckner notes: "...wokism, this academic religion (Jean-François Braunstein) from the United States, has designated the white man and woman, Jews included, as the new racists by birth, whatever the efforts made to free oneself from this fatality."

What can be done against this new categorical imperative of victimhood thinking? How can we live with our wounds? The author proposes taking an offensive approach. First, by fighting against lies. The purveyors of " fake news " are extremely numerous within dictatorships that seek to destabilize the institutions of pluralist democracy. France, the United States, and Great Britain have seen many of their elections disrupted by an avalanche of false information. Dictatorships make extensive use of camouflage and denial. The fight against victimhood therefore involves a fight against concealment and lies. For example, the grim tally of civilian deaths in Gaza kept by Hamas's "Ministry of Health" also encompasses a struggle to verify the reliability of the sources behind these daily death tolls. The oppressed have all rights, including, at times, the right to disregard the basic rules of truth.

Independently of this fight for the truth of the suffering endured, that of justice and reparation is essential and accompanies all the exits from genocidal suffering: the Nuremberg trials, the Gacaca tribunals in Rwanda, transitional justice in El Salvador, the International Criminal Court in The Hague are all judicial bodies that attempt to combine punishment and reparation. On a more symbolic level, commemoration is also a process of recognizing suffering and appeasing it. But none of these instruments for healing wounds is safe from political uses and manipulations. And, Pascal Bruckner carries conviction when he tells us that "the only way to repair the crimes of the past is to prevent their repetition in the present time." Rather than maintaining suffering as a more or less heroic and precious heritage, it is a question for communities as well as individuals of getting out of it and of "leaving the martyr's habit to enter the order of freedom" (p. 270).

When we close this beautiful book, this is the major lesson to remember. Against all forms of servitude, whether voluntary or involuntary, the oppressed and the victims must have the courage to use their own understanding to access the responsibilities that freedom entails. Was it not Nelson Mandela, a victim of apartheid and a prisoner for twenty-seven years in South African jails, who wrote, “We are not yet free; we have only achieved the freedom to be free.” ( Long Walk to Freedom , 1996)? To leave behind the state of “official victim,” we must, as Pascal Bruckner’s courageous journey along the tortuous paths of heroicized suffering invites us to do, “break the attachment to oneself, not shut oneself up in those small circles of self-proclaimed martyrs who become intoxicated by their condition to the point of hypnosis” (p. 287). Suffering is not a confinement, much less an identity. I suffer, therefore I am… No. I suffer, therefore I live… A victim has the right to leave the past behind.