Preface

This book brings together papers which were either published or delivered at conferences between 2010 and 2021. But the collection makes sense in a broader overview of the transformations that have affected our world since the end of the 1980s, with the break represented by the collapse of the Soviet system. Everyone can remember the speculations to which the end of the Cold War gave rise at the time. In 1991, Francis Fukuyama's best-selling book The End of History and the Last Man announced the coming of a world standardized and pacified by the joint reign of liberal economics and political democracy.1 These predictions reflected the more widespread feeling that the era of ideologies and the deadly conflicts they engendered had passed: we had entered an age of realism when the dispassionate consideration of objective problems would give birth to a world at peace. This is what was called, in France, the 'consensus'.

We must now take stock of these promises and delve deeper into the nature and effects of the consensus. It is not only new ethnic wars and reawakened religious fanaticisms that have thwarted the peace which this consensus promised. It is the consensus itself that has turned into its opposite, or rather revealed its truth, in the incredible scenario of the last American election when the president of the 'greatest democracy in the world' declared that the results of the elections were not what they were, and launched hordes of fanatics to storm the Capitol. At the same time, old Europe saw far-right parties take centre stage almost everywhere; their ideas spread very widely through the spheres of government, the media and the intellectual class.

The texts brought together in the first part of this book mark out the several stages of this reversal - which was also a consummation - of consensual realism. By following this line of argument, I have had to distance myself from what is currently a favourite way of marking out the present time: one that regularly sees exceptional events as opening up radically new eras. This was already the case with the collapse of the towers of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, interpreted at the time as a symbolic break that pushed us into a new era. More recently, the coronavirus pandemic has been analysed as the moment when the very balance between human beings and nature was disrupted, entailing a radical change in the civilizational paradigm. In both cases, however, we have seen how closely the 'world after' resembled the world before. The violence of Islamist terrorism and the violence of the virus were managed as external aggressions to which the governments of the communities affected reacted by using the means of protection already implemented in the ordinary state of consensus - that is, by reinforcing the feeling of identity, state security and the absolute authority of the experts. The handling of the exception was in accordance with the rule. This does not mean that we live in a 'state of exception' but, on the contrary, that the regular functioning of the dominant machine has contrived to treat all disturbances, large or small, in the same way - a terrorist attack is treated like a fall in the stock market index, a pandemic like a street demonstration.

It is this 'regular' functioning of the consensual machine that the papers collected here analyse, marking out its manifestations and effects. In them, I show that the consensus is by no means the peace that it promised. Rather, it is the map of the territory on which new forms of warfare are being waged. Even before the publication of the book in which Francis Fukuyama hailed the global triumph of liberalism, the firestorm unleashed by the American armies in Iraq had shown what this triumph consisted of: the absolute equation of might and right, of the limitless expansion of power with a justice that George W. Bush, at the time of the second invasion of Iraq, would call infinite. Those who remember how this justice was demonstrated with lies borrowed from the propagandist arsenal of the so-called totalitarian powers (the corpses of infants snatched from the hospital and abandoned on the frozen ground, weapons of mass destruction targeting Western capitals.) will better understand how this sequence of a 'liberalism' out to conquer the world came to a climax with the deluge of lies in the name of which Donald Trump launched his militant troops against the headquarters of American representative power. Such is the logic of consensus. It proclaims its own version of peace, which has at its heart the equation between the power of wealth and the absolutism of right. It declares that the old divisions of political conflict and class struggle are obsolete. At the same time, it acknowledges only one form of alterity: the alterity of the outsider, the absolutely other - an empire of evil against which all violence is legitimate, or an absolute victim whose rights are appropriated without restraint.

It was in a slower, more sophisticated way that consensus developed its effects in old Europe. Not as the affirmation of a global civilizing mission but as the simple adherence to the necessary course of things. For that is what 'consensus' means: not the agreement that it is better to discuss things than to wage war, but the recognition that there is nothing to discuss because objective reality authorizes only one choice. The objective reality that imposed itself at the end of the 1990s was the reality of an absolutized and globalized capitalism to which each country had to submit. This 'no alternative' had initially been the winning formula of the counter-revolution led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. But almost everywhere in Europe, we saw formerly socialist parties endorsing it and recognizing it as the ineluctable order of things to which everyone had to adapt. And to this end it was necessary to liquidate any vestiges of the past which posed obstacles to it: workers' rights, labour laws, welfare systems, public services shielded from competition, etc. This attack on the achievements of decades of social struggle conveniently robbed the obsolescent Marxist tradition of its hard core: the faith in historical necessity. This had once meant that the very development of capitalism led to its self-destruction and to the advent of socialism. That is why Marxist thinkers stigmatized backward artisans attached to forms of the past which held back the forward movement of capitalism and the working class. Now it was the workers of this same working class struggling for the maintenance of their rights who were stigmatized as backward, defending archaic privileges to the detriment of future generations. On this basis, part of the left-wing intelligentsia came to support the efforts of right-wing governments and identified this 'archaism' with another 'backwardness', that of the nostalgia of a far right that was racist and obsessed with questions of identity. These trends now merged into the same negative figure, 'populism', the supposed mode of expression of a lower class overtaken by modernity. That is how the alliance between the representatives of financial power and the representatives of science and enlightened opinion was sealed.

But the struggle of the new enlightenment against 'populist' backwardness needed to follow some rather tortuous paths. The parties of the reasonable consensus present themselves as a bulwark against the resurgence of the identity-based and racist far right. But this so-called opposition is actually complicity. Our consensual governments are removing all barriers to the free flow of capital. But when it comes to its reverse side, the other circulation of populations wishing to enjoy some share in the wealth accumulated in privileged countries, they establish an economic division of tasks: on the one hand, they take the administrative and policing measures necessary for containing the influx of undesirable populations (the Dublin Regulation, border police, the tightening of conditions for naturalization, etc.); on the other hand, they leave the imaginary management of this undesirability to the far right, whose natural specialty it is. But, at the same time, they claim to have stripped the far right of its weapons by showing that they themselves are better at fighting the enemy that nourishes the passions of the far right, namely immigration - a generic term subsuming all the problems posed by the populations from the former colonies and by new migrants driven out of their countries by poverty or violence. Thus a number of measures were taken which, on the pretext of depriving the far right of its hobbyhorse, continuously reinforced the figure of the unassimilable Other that the same far right brandished as a threat. Thus was constituted, in the guise of the struggle against dirty racism, the 'clean' figure of what I have proposed we call 'racism from above': a double-trigger racism where the open contempt of well-born people for the backward plebs is coupled with a fascination, at first discreet but nowadays exhibited in broad daylight, for the unapologetic racism attributed to those same plebs. The supposedly neutral figure of the security state, protecting the population against ever-present threats - an economic crisis, a recession, an epidemic, illegal immigration, Islamist terrorism - has never ceased, by its very operation, to reinforce this naked hatred of the Other that the state had claimed to disarm. The...