The dissolution of the National Assembly has suddenly plunged a large part of the population into a state of shock. This feeling, which has not only affected leftists but even the closest members of the Macronist camp, is perhaps not due to chance. We are used to the cynical lies of the oligarchic mess. What is astonishing here is that we feel a shock that borders on outrage, on intimate scandal, on the feeling of having been plunged for almost ten years, under the leadership not of a lying politician but of a sort of toxic ex, an equivocal manipulator, in reality, and this is the intuition of sociologist Marc Joly as of Anne Crignon (See: Ve République: un suspicion de perversion narcissique), under the influence of a "narcissistic pervert" in the midst of a crisis. This intuition is not insignificant. It indicates a change in the current structures of domination and its legitimation. According to Joly, we have moved from a legitimization of social inequalities through "symbolic violence", or the unconscious internalization of the unjust order and the worldview of the dominant, to a kind of brutal exposure of domination, exposure where the power of enjoyment of power is no longer played out in the mocking mode of appearance, in the satisfying mode of a snake swallowed in silence through the medium of symbols, but in the terribly mediocre mode of "moral violence", of moral harassment, of enjoyment not of appearance, but of micromanagement, of the capacity to dislocate souls, the coherence of things, the meaning of the world and essential truths, the ability to titillate one's vampirized victims to death, to assume oneself to be irresponsible, and to martyrize citizens as if they were little toys in the hands of an infantile pervert. For Joly, the decline, due to feminist or other criticism, of the camouflage in the symbolic violence of patriarchal and capitalist masculinities, has engendered a society in which the mode by which the dominant enjoys his domination over the dominated is not based on the feeling of having had him well, well duped, but that of being able to continually plunge him into a state of stupor, of offense, of non-existence, on the basis of an arsenal of paradoxical injunctions, of indifference to contradiction and to truth (paradoxality), of erasure of historical continuities (gaslighting) and of everything that makes sense. The world of symbolic violence seems to be giving way to the naked world of moral violence, and in this in-between, everywhere, in families, groups, businesses and even state institutions, there emerge these disturbing figures of the "narcissistic pervert", the "predator", the being whose life is devoted only to maintaining and constantly renewing his hold. Is Macron one of them? What does this reveal to us about our contemporary sensibilities, our analytical frameworks for power and the exhaustion of the institutions of the Fifth Republic? Where domination seems to let its frank perversity burst forth without the buffer of appearances, are we dealing with the end of an era of governmentality? Are we living a twilight of power shaken to its foundations and forced to reduce itself to pure perverse efficiency? Or are we discovering that power no longer needs to hide in order to enjoy itself, because it has become total and without an exit? It will be said that the desert can no longer grow.
Certainly. But Joly teaches us that it can still become ugly.
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