[by Sami Biasoni]
The contemporary history of our country, that of the past century to which some can still bear witness, has probably only known two moments of real convergence of social struggles: the democratic victory of the Popular Front in 1936 and the junction between the student and workers' movements during the general strikes of May 68. Since then, we have witnessed a more or less happy succession of juxtapositions of causes, where what motivates the protester is as much the socio-psychological trauma linked to his own identity as the deep conviction in a noble shared ideal. To be convinced of this, one only has to go back to the events of Nuit Debout in 2016 or to the last Acts of the Yellow Vests movement, episodes marked by militant disunity and by the impasse of the definition of a common line of demands.
Following the tragic death of George Floyd in May 2020, various demonstrations were held in France at the joint initiative of environmentalist associations and racialist groups claiming a new form of intersectionality. This concept, initially developed in the 1990s, aims to qualify the particular condition of individuals through the analysis of the cumulative intersection of oppressions that they would suffer by the very fact of their birth or their choices: skin color, gender, sexuality, disability would thus found the decisive categories sealing the fate of each and every one. Based on the axiom according to which "climate justice [would be] social justice" (climate justice is social justice) Postmodern progressive thought today attempts to make the connection between ecological and decolonialist struggles, evoking the environmental crisis as an additional lever of oppression and reinforcing ipso facto the foundations of the intersectional building.
In reality, what intimately links these movements is not so much the faith in the need for a saving revolt as the hatred of a West accused of all evils: hated for having been imperialist as much as for having irremediably marked with its hateful imprint souls (permanence of the colonial condition), societies (inequalities due to capitalism) and the planet (environmental pollution linked to the way of life of the North part). Consequently, the only acceptable redemption would consist of economic decline coupled with a erasure of the standard for the benefit of minority groups – in other words, a form of sacrificial historical abdication in the name of a heritage from which Western man cannot free himself and in spite of the most firmly affirmed humanist convictions which he could claim.
Intersectionality isolates individuals by reducing them to their lowest common denominator, whereas universalism seeks the convergence of all, with respect for each individual. The former fragments identities and dissociates peoples, the latter seeks the common, it believes in the equal right of all to dignity and respect. The American Democratic lawyer Clarence Darrow declared in the last century that "the man who fights for others is better than the man who fights for himself". However, the advocates of intersectionality fight above all for themselves: such is the impasse of their identitarian posture.
When some American researchers like Nancy Tuana speak of a "climate apartheid" to describe the double colonial and environmental oppression of which the countries of the South would be victims, far from adequately thinking about the world, they atrophy its complexity, passing over in silence the geostrategic balances between civilizational areas, knowingly neglecting the massive use of fossil fuels in developing countries, acting as if cultures and values were no longer conditioning anthropological choices, modestly turning a blind eye to the demographic question, finally amalgamating economic and social realities that are nevertheless rigorously irreconcilable within the West itself. Simplification does not suit the determinants of reality, the latter can never be circumscribed by the opportunistic addition of arbitrary categories.
Sami Biasoni – Doctor of Philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure, lecturer at ESSEC, co-author (with A.-S. Nogaret) of the essay French in spite of themselves, Sami Biasoni will publish in 2022 Language discomfort (dir.) and The statistically correct published by Éditions du Cerf.
