Note: These thoughts are an extension of my recently published book: From Hero to Victim: The Contemporary Metamorphosis of the Sacred, Paris, Gallimard, 2024.
In the "Final Remarks" of the Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Bergson introduced a new concept: that of "double frenzy." In the evolution of life, he said, two contradictory tendencies always face each other and balance each other. But when one comes to resolutely take over the other, the first, having no more obstacles to combat, runs wildly, frantically, and demands to be followed to the end "as if there were an end."
There is in the victim ideology that has taken hold of Western societies for about half a century – in the United States since the 1960s, in France about ten years later – something of this law of double frenzy. It first had to deal with a force that was still powerful in the sixties and seventies: that of the State. There could be victims, but they were supervised by an authority that overlooked individuals and regulated their appetite for victimization and their desire for recognition. When human rights began to take the place of politics, to borrow the phrase from a famous article by Marcel Gauchet in the eighties, individuals who held rights became potential victims that nothing, soon, was able to counter. With religious transcendence having faded and political transcendence reabsorbed into the calm ambition of an open society, the reign of victims was able to take on an irresistible and contagious boom. This is evidenced by the series of measures taken by Robert Badinter, then Keeper of the Seals, at the beginning of the XNUMXs: the decision to make the cause of victims a "national cause", the report requested from Professor Milliez on victims' rights, the vote on the law on systematic compensation for victims, even those at fault, when they are injured by a land vehicle, the creation of the National Institute for Victim Assistance, etc.
From there, the victim dynamic, which nothing can hinder, unfolds and produces all its effects. The first are the so-called "memorial" laws which are staged from 1990 (Gayssot law) to 2005 (Law No. 2005-158 of February 23, 2005 on the recognition of the Nation and national contribution in favor of repatriated French people), passing through the law on the recognition of the Armenian genocide (2001) and the so-called Taubira law (2001) on the (transatlantic) slave trade declared a crime against humanity.
The induced effects of this legislative frenzy are no less important: in January 2005, Houria Bouteldja launched an appeal for the foundations of post-colonial anti-colonialism, better known under the title "We are the natives of the Republic", where the color is clearly announced, if I may say so: the descendants of slaves are victims like their ancestors were, no less. On May 12 of the same year, the International Movement for Reparations (MIR) was created, which summons the French State to pay reparations for slavery; on November 26, the CRAN, Representative Council of Black Associations, was created on the model of the CRIF; and, to complete the parallel, the annual CRAN dinner was instituted in January 2006, the counterpart of the annual CRIF dinner that has existed since 1985.
“Decolonialism” is launched and, with it, the category of victim reveals the potentialities that it contained but which had not yet appeared in broad daylight.
First, the fact that victimhood is not an accident, but an essence, the victims are ontologically victims and executioners ontologically executioners. Pierre Tevanian: "Whites are sick with a disease called racism and it affects them all in different ways even when they are not racist."[1]. Victimhood restores the concept of original sin, but in this ideological figure from which religion has disappeared, there is no longer any salvation; sin has become damnation. We will find this essential dimension in the case of "wokism".
Then, victimhood extends to everything. The concept of "colonial continuum" is crucial here. There is a continuity first temporal between yesterday and today (the descendants of slaves are victims even if they are presidents of the United States). But also spatial: nothing escapes coloniality. Thus, Françoise Vergès tells us: "patriarchy, State and capital, reproductive justice, environmental justice and criticism of the pharmaceutical industry, rights of migrants, refugees and end of femicide, fight against the racial Anthropocene-Capitalocene and criminalization of society"[2], everything is biased by colonialism, which, therefore, has not disappeared at all, today's teachers, police officers, administrators being the carbon copies of colonial administrators and soldiers. Nothing new under the sun.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the true nature of the victim and what makes her unsinkable emerges: she is sacred. Nothing she does can be guilty, everything she does is dictated by her immovable status as a victim.
Not that the decolonialists and other natives of the Republic invented the sacralization of the victim. In reality, it has been progressing quietly since the 1950s and 1960s, it took off in the 1970s and reached a threshold of visibility in the 1980s, with two major events: the release in 1985 of Lanzmann's film, Shoah, and the holding of the Barbie trial in 1987. There, in both cases, the victim – Jewish – appeared in all her power of sacredness, like the horrible counterpart of the tremendum fascinosum which Rudolf Otto had once made the mark of the sacred, as tremendum horrendum, as Paul Ricœur said, rightly in 1985. Sacred without religion, antithetical even to religion because it was by abandoning all theodicy, and all theology, that this new category of victim was able to appear – and first of all the victim of Auschwitz, who had ended up being admitted to have died neither for the Sanctification of the Name nor for the anti-fascist fight, but for nothing.
Endowing the victim with sacredness was perhaps inevitable. But it was creating a terrible trap. Because, once sacred, the victim can be neither guilty, nor a liar, nor perverse. The tragedy of the Outreau trial will show with all the light one could wish for how devastating the conviction that victims cannot lie can be. "The child speaks the truth," Ségolène Royal will calmly assert, forgetting the Freudian lesson of the polymorphous perverse child. And the ♯MeToo movement, whatever its good intentions and, to a certain extent, its merits, will rediscover this terrible temptation which is to demand that sexually assaulted women be believed at their word, because they are victims. The "presumption of truthfulness" will seek to replace the presumption of innocence, the foundation of our law.
Decolonialism rushes into the sacralization of the victim where it can only find primary benefits. First and foremost, the fact that a descendant of a slave, racialized by definition, can never be racist himself. A black man who says he wants to "take revenge on white people", "get some little white people", as one of them says, is in no way a racist, he is only someone who takes revenge[3]. Because whites are never targeted as a white group by oppressive policies, writes Rokhaya Diallo, there is no anti-white racism.[4]"Only white people can be racist," Robin DiAngelo says in a best-selling book.[5]In other words, anti-white racism is nothing but a “victim fantasy,” as academic Éric Fassin writes without batting an eyelid.[6] who, regarding rapes committed by Muslims, exonerates them on the grounds that such acts have a "political purpose" because they express the frustration of rapists at the sexual emancipation of women from their religion in Europe.
The important thing in such remarks is obviously not to be indignant or to laugh at them, but to understand the concept of the victim that they imply: a victim, because she is a victim, cannot commit a vile action, she embodies Good – just as she embodies Truth. No evil can result from her. By which one can see the sacred dimension with which she is now invested and which gives her this incapacity for evil. Decolonialism, which is only one of the ultimate figures of the victim ideology, recycles holiness but in a context that excludes any properly religious referent since there is no longer any God, no longer any transcendence, no longer any salvation in this new doctrine.
It is worth reading the last pages of Robin DiAngelo's book where she testifies to her guilt of being white in a kind of confession that refers to an original sin but not a Christian one since there is no remission:
“Because I was socialized in a society based on racism, I know that I have a racist worldview, deep prejudices, racist habits […]. A positive white identity is an inherently racist goal; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy. […] I am struggling to be “less white.” […] This requires a better awareness of race, a better education about racism, […] while accepting the idea of a racism inscribed in me. And rather than being defensive, I can be willing to see it more clearly in order to remedy it.”
Let us pay attention here to phrases like “better awareness”, “seeing more clearly”: the word “ Woke " is not spoken, but that is what this confession, so naive and so eloquent, is about. Awakening to the reality of the sin that constitutes "whiteness" is the agenda of Robin DiAngelo and so many others. Measuring the weight of all the inequalities that weigh on women, lesbians, gays, bi and trans people, the population of foreign origin, is, says journalist Assma Maad, finally waking up[7]. Without forgetting of course the fight against global warming – Greta Thunberg is “a typically woke figure”, writes Pap Ndiaye[8].
It is impossible to ignore the crypto-religious dimension of this movement which evokes, almost explicitly, the tradition of Protestant "Religious Awakenings", as Jean-François Braunstein has clearly shown in a book which bears the title: Woke Religion. Moreover, certain rites woke especially in the United States, are directly demarcated from Christianity: the washing of the feet of black activists by white assistants, the ritual repetition of formulas of repentance, kneeling before the representatives of the victims. And moreover, on June 8, 2020, Lori Bush, mayor of the small town of Cary in North Carolina, went so far as to say that this ritual was the means of "renewing the washing [of feet] that comes from Christ, and of seeking and celebrating reconciliation with others."[9]. Very eloquent is this prayer recited in Bethesda in June 2020 during a ceremony of the “Black Lives Matter” movement: “Against racism, discrimination against Black people and violence, […] I will use my voice in the most edifying way possible […], and I will do everything in my power to educate my community […]. I will love my Black neighbors the same way I love my white neighbors.[10].. "
Are we dealing here with a new religion? I am reluctant to go in that direction, even if it is tempting. That woke activists copy Christian formulas and rites is not in doubt; but no more than Canada Dry is alcohol, the imitation of Christianity is not Christianity. Without transcendence, without God, without eschatology, how can we expect there to be Christianity? The secular religions that devastated the previous century – fascism, Nazism, communism – had in common, even if their eschatology was secular, to aim for transcendence: the classless society, the thousand-year Reich, etc. Here, there is nothing of the sort as we know it. The movement Woke proliferates on the ruins of Christianity, from which it copies certain rites but detaches them from the dogma and eschatological perspectives from which this religion was inseparable. There is nothing religious left in the wokism if not the memory of Christianity.
On the other hand, we are here in the heart of the sacred dimension of the victim, sacred not being synonymous with religious. There is something sacred outside of the religious as Durkheim once noted for whom "the distinction between sacred and profane things is very often independent of any idea of God"[11]The reign of the victim, which has extended to almost all Western societies, does not signify, whatever one may say, the permanence or the return of religion; rather, it consecrates its disappearance and its replacement by a figure endowed with sacredness which is the mark of our incapacity, perhaps temporary, to think of suffering, misfortune, Evil, in a universe that the gods have deserted.
