Reading note of The Disoriented West by Jean-Loup Bonnamy, Éditions de l'Observatoire, Paris, 2024 (21 E.).
A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, with a teaching qualification and a doctorate in philosophy, Jean-Loup Bonnamy is primarily a high school teacher. He is also deeply influenced by his Franche-Comté roots and upbringing. A native of rural France, where he lives and works, Bonnamy is also well-versed in Parisian academic and media circles. He is intimately familiar with the former, having completed a significant portion of his studies there, notably at the École Normale Supérieure on rue d'Ulm—whose terminal crisis will be complete when this teacher training college no longer produces any professors (editor's note)—and with the latter, having spent a year on various CNews programs, followed by another year as a regular contributor to the RMC radio show "Grande Gueule."
Bonnamy is a keen and critical observer of the contemporary world - he specializes in global geopolitics - and of our society in crisis, of which he knows several institutions emblematic of its upheavals. This atypical great reader stands out among the thirty-somethings, too often fans of series and in love with themselves: he demands meaning and accountability from the world in which he has arrived. Unlike the fifty-somethings and sixty-somethings, who have seen our world collapse, and our society deconstruct itself with enthusiastic zeal - illustrating the prediction that Albert Camus could not avert: " Every generation, no doubt, believes itself destined to remake the world. Mine knows, however, that it will not remake it. But its task is perhaps greater. It consists of preventing the world from falling apart. "-, Jean-Loup Bonnamy arrived in a world that had been destroyed. Having understood this, he was one of the first writers of his generation to evoke this vanished world based on the remains of its decomposition, which, as an eclectic and assiduous reader, he apprehended with finesse.
His last attempt, The West is disoriented -which is very easy to read because it is very well written- is a brilliant psycho-archaeology of our sick Western society -French in particular-. The archaeology of knowledge here turns into the archaeology of deconstruction. The disoriented West is not sick or the victim of external aggression, but of its own decomposition. Explaining it does not consist in making witch trials (against immigration, Putin, the Chinese or Islam), nor in engaging in a great theoretical or philosophical reflection on the collapse of civilizations, but in analyzing in a factual manner, by means of welcome illustrations, of real anecdotes which illustrate the chapter headings, this curious abandonment of their civilization by the French and by the Westerners. This process has been underway since the sixties under the direction of true prescribers of the collapse. The explanatory key lies in an inextinguishable hatred of oneself, of one's language, of previous generations - and of their ruling classes in particular - and of the fabric (warp and weft combined) that forges our civilization. "There is no French civilization" (nor any culture for that matter) was able to say a non-French President of the Republic - if we understand correctly.
What strikes Bonnamy is the centrality, primacy and Western exception that our deconstructionists preserve and protect against all odds. Although they absolutely and uncompromisingly refute Western domination of the world in past centuries - which they thereby condemn to the pillory - they have retained the same explanatory bias as their "civilizing" ancestors: after Europe wanted to transform and "civilize" the world, it would have become the source and main cause of its misfortunes (war, poverty, emigration, ecological crisis). etc.). Blind to the demographic and political collapse of the West, to the advent of a "global south" in a cartel of dictatorships, as well as to the emergence of a truly multipolar world, the new devotees of an inverted Westernism continue to believe in the permanence of Western domination: they are only interested in the murders of people of color if they are committed by "whites", and similarly in the ecological crisis if it is attributable to the West; as soon as a genocide is committed on the planet, they hasten to take responsibility for it; and when non-Caucasians commit crimes in the United States or Europe, they hasten to conceal the facts and euphemize the responsibility of said criminals. This is how the "madness of the white man" is transmitted in reverse, an expression of André Malraux fortunately discovered by Bonnamy, who establishes the West as the beating heart of the world-system.
The march towards the abyss described by the author has little to do with a clash of civilizations, which would pit a weakened West against its most determined adversaries (Islam, Russia, China, etc.). Rather, Bonnamy tells us, it is a clash of uncultures taking place on our own soil. This pits young French and Americans, uprooted and decultured by their elders, against young immigrants from the south, whom the same have forbidden to "integrate" into a civilization that has lost its logos, its hope and the very awareness of its existence. We have understood how Bonnamy leads us on the path of wokism - this "monstrous child of the Enlightenment", which turns the failure of the universalist promise of the 18th century - the advent of a new, egalitarian and happy humanity - against its designers, in the name of cultural and racial differentialism.
The religious radicalism of Americans, mutating into a "zombie Protestantism" (an expression "borrowed" from E. Todd), has seized upon these crazy ideas and forged the new doxa of American campuses and Western bourgeois student youth. Behind this ideology run old far-left ideologues, capitalists, communicators and enemies of the West. A brew from which Bonnamy invites us to get out as quickly as possible for the good of all, in mutual respect for cultures, their particularities and their riches.
We cannot recommend this rich, uninhibited, intelligent and cultured essay highly enough.
