Review of the latest work by Pascal Bruckner, I suffer therefore I am. Portrait of the victim as hero, Paris, Grasset, 2024, 318 p.
Pascal Bruckner's latest work tackles a key issue in our contemporary world, that of victimization that has gradually invaded all Western societies, from the memory fever that gripped Emmanuel Macron's last terms in office to the proliferation of victimization entrepreneurs that many neo-feminist, anti-racist, pro-Palestinian or LGBTQ organizations have become. The author speaks of a process of heroization of the victim and of an indefinite extension of the victim field where even "the privileged can play the damned". To paraphrase the leftist logomachy that speaks of a "convergence of struggles", there is, under the empire of wokism, a real convergence of victim suffering of all kinds. grievance studies on American campuses are flourishing and have established a continuous extension of the fight against all suffering reclassified as “aggressions” and “micro-aggressions” that zealous DEI departments (Diversity, equity, inclusion) hunt down in the slightest of their manifestations… In France, at university and in society, this large-scale victimization process continues to progress.
For Pascal Bruckner, this rapid contamination was made possible by the change in our attitude towards misfortune. The spirit of the Enlightenment had established the belief in a better world freed from fatalism and fanaticism and, in 1794, a few months before being guillotined, Saint-Just was able to proclaim: "Happiness is a new idea in Europe." Today this idea seems abandoned and a real "society of complaint and sobbing" is taking hold. As Max Scheler had analyzed in 1923 (The Man of Resentment)) resentment has become the dominant passion of modern humanitarianism. In a society of permanent solicitude, every effort becomes pain and a real market in affliction flourishes. In Pascal Bruckner's analysis, we find the echo of Michel Schneider's study on the Welfare State transformed into Big Mother (Big Mother: Psychopathology of Political Life, 2002) faced with infantilized citizens driven by multiple resentments. The Republic becomes compassionate and commiseration is an integral part of civic-mindedness and life in society. The latter then becomes a "great tribe of stigmatized people". Everyone takes up the litany of the slave and the colonized. The "dominated" are everywhere and the condition of the dominated is not only an income to be made to bear fruit but it becomes hereditary: "Damned of the earth could become a hereditary profession" exclaims Pascal Bruckner on page 85 of his work. Faced with so many misfortunes listed and accumulated, our societies are no longer capable of rejoicing or of accepting since every 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 we do against this new categorical imperative of victim thinking? How can we live with our wounds? The author suggests being offensive. First, by fighting against lies. The entrepreneurs of " fakenews " are extremely numerous at the heart of 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 great use of camouflage and denial. The fight against victimization therefore involves a fight against concealment and lies. For example, the sinister accounting of civilian deaths in Gaza kept by the Hamas "Ministry of Health" also covers a fight to verify the reliability of the sources that are at the origin of these daily casualty reports. The oppressed has every right, including sometimes the right to free themselves from the elementary 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 very beautiful work, this is the major lesson to remember. Against all voluntary or involuntary servitude, the oppressed and the victims must have the courage to use their own understanding to access the responsibilities that freedom implies. Was it not Nelson Mandela, victim of apartheid and 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." (A long way to freedom, 1996)? To leave the state of "official tortured", we must, as Pascal Bruckner's courageous journey on the tortuous paths of heroic suffering invites us to do, "break the clinging to oneself, not lock oneself in these small circles of self-proclaimed martyrs who get drunk on their condition to the point of hypnosis" (p. 287). Suffering is not a house arrest, 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.
