Complexe d’Orphée. La gauche, les gens ordinaires et la religion du progrès (Éditions Climats, 2011) et le Mystère de la gauche. De l’idéal des Lumières au triomphe du capitalisme absolu (Éditions Climats, 2013).
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Michea
Je mets ce philosophe ici, en particulier parce qu'il a introduit la pensée de Christopher Lasch en France, un penseur dont j'ai lu certains livres et qui mérite qu'on s'y attarde.
http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/lasch.html
Christopher Lasch was one of those rare figures in American public life who was respected by people on both the left and the right, among scholars as well as ordinary folks, in intellectual circles as well as among those who have no patience for abstract ideas. As a historican and cultural critic, he was perhaps best known for The Culture of Narcissism, which became a bestseller in the late 1970s. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, a collection of essays published after his death in 1994, represents Lasch at his best — timely, perceptive, and intellectually uncompromising.
The book brings together thirteen essays (ten of which have been adapted from previously published articles) on what Lasch describes as America's "democratic malaise." The book is divided into three parts: the first looks at the "intensification of social divisions" in the nation; the second surveys the degradation of contemporary public discourse; and the third offers Lasch's reflections on the spiritual predicament at the heart of America's social and political crisis.
The book's title is a take-off on Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, a reactionary work published in 1930 that ascribed the crisis of Western culture to the "political domination of the masses." Ortega believed that the rise of the masses threatened democracy by undermining the ideals of civic virtue that characterized the old ruling elites. But in late twentieth-century America it is not the masses so much as an emerging elite of professional and managerial types who constitute the greatest threat to democracy, according to Lasch. The new cognitive elite is made up of what Robert Reich called "symbolic analysts" — lawyers, academics, journalists, systems analysts, brokers, bankers, etc. These professionals traffic in information and manipulate words and numbers for a living. They live in an abstract world in which information and expertise are the most valuable commodities. Since the market for these assets is international, the privileged class is more concerned with the global system than with regional, national, or local communities. In fact, members of the new elite tend to be estranged from their communities and their fellow citizens. "They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies ... and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence against them," Lasch writes. "In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life."
The privileged classes, which, according to Lasch's "expansive" definition, now make up roughly a fifth of the population, are heavily invested in the notion of social mobility. The new meritocracy has made professional advancement and the freedom to make money "the overriding goal of social policy." Lasch charges that the fixation on opportunity and the "democratization of competence" betrays rather than exemplifies the American dream. "The reign of specialized expertise," he writes, "is the antithesis of democracy as it was understood by those who saw this country as the 'last, best hope of earth'". Citizenship is grounded not in equal access to economic competition but in shared participation in a common life and a common political dialogue. The aim is not to hold out the promise of escape from the "laboring classes," Lasch contends, but to ground the values and institutions of democracy in the inventiveness, industry, self-reliance, and self-respect of working people.
The decline of democratic discourse has come about largely at the hands of the elites, or "talking classes," as Lasch refers to them. Intelligent debate about common concerns has been almost entirely supplanted by ideological quarrels, sour dogma, and name-calling. The growing insularity of what passes for public discourse today has been exacerbated, he says, by the loss of "third places" — beyond the home and workplace — which foster the sort of free-wheeling and spontaneous conversation among citizens on which democracy thrives. Without the civic institutions — ranging from political parties to public parks and informal meeting places — that "promote general conversation across class lines," social classes increasingly "speak to themselves in a dialect of their own, inaccessible to outsiders." In "The Lost Art of Argument," Lasch laments the degradation of public discourse at the hands of a media establishment more committed to a "misguided ideal of objectivity" than to providing context and continuity — the foundation for a meaningful public debate.
In a final section titled "The Dark Night of the Soul," Lasch examines what he considers a spiritual crisis at the heart of Western culture. This crisis is the product of an over-attachment to the secular worldview, he maintains, which has left the knowledge elite with little room for doubt and insecurity. Traditionally, institutional religion provided a home for spiritual uncertainties as well as a source of higher meaning and a repository of practical moral wisdom. The new elites, however, in their embrace of science and secularism, look upon religion with a disdain bordering on hostility. "The culture of criticism is understood to rule out religious commitments," Lasch observes. Today, religion is "something useful for weddings and funerals but otherwise dispensable." Bereft of a higher ethic, the knowledge classes have taken refuge in a culture of cynicism, inoculating themselves with irreverence. "The collapse of religion," he writes, "its replacement by the remorselessly critical sensibility exemplified by psychoanalysis, and the degeneration of the 'analytic attitude' into an all-out assault on ideals of every kind have left our culture in a sorry state."
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lasch
Œuvres traduites en français
La Culture du narcissisme – La vie américaine à un âge de déclin des espérances (The Culture of narcissism – American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations, 1979), Climats, 2000, (ISBN 2-84158139).
Le moi assiégé (The Minimal Self, 1984), Climats, 2008.
Le Seul et Vrai Paradis (The True and Only Paradise, 1991), Champs/Flammarion, 200210.
La Révolte des élites et la trahison de la démocratie (The revolt of elites and the betrayal of democracy, 1994), Climats, 1999.
Les Femmes et la vie ordinaire (Women and the Common Life. Love, Marriage, and Feminism, 1997), Climats, 2006.
Culture de masse ou culture populaire ? (traduction de l'article « Mass Culture Reconsidered », paru in democracy, 1, octobre 1981, p. 7-22), Climats, 2001.
Un refuge dans ce monde impitoyable (Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged, 1977), Bourin Éditeur, 2012.
La culture de l'égoïsme" (entretiens avec Castoriadis), Climats 2012
Culture, politique et société
Influencé par le courant idéologique de l'école de Francfort5, Christopher Lasch pose un regard critique vis-à-vis des industries culturelles. Dans Culture de masse ou culture populaire ?, il critique la définition de la culture de masse telle que la gauche « libérale-libertaire » la conçoit, et qui voit dans toute critique de la société des loisirs une pensée conservatrice. Les critiques contre l’industrialisation de la culture sont perçues comme des critiques de la démocratie elle-même. Pour le sociologue Benoit Ricard, « Lasch montre avec finesse que l'avènement de l'individualisme, par la conjonction du droit et du capitalisme, a scié les racines de la culture populaire et ses ramifications sociales et sociologiques, telles que l'entraide mutuelle, l'autonomie des transmissions de la culture »6 mais « en un mot, si Lasch pose les bonnes questions pour l'avenir de la culture et du monde en général, celle du lien social par exemple, il répond à côté, lorsqu'il vilipende le recul d'expressions différentes et lorsqu'il s'inquiète de l'impossibilité donnée par la culture de masse à l'expression des conditions possibles minimales de l'espace public »7.
Véritable leurre selon lui, la visée de démocratisation de la culture aboutit à uniformiser les propositions culturelles et à manipuler les citoyens. Ces valeurs libérales s’ancrent selon lui dans la philosophie des Lumières, qui tait les particularismes et engage une révolution culturelle. Il reproche à cette idéologie de faire de la modernité un concept qui dissout et rompt avec toute forme de tradition.
Comparant le développement de la France à celui de l’Amérique, il pense que la liquidation des racines et de l’enracinement au profit du « melting pot » est le chemin que prend la société française. Celui-ci se caractérise par la croyance selon laquelle seuls les déracinés peuvent accéder à une véritable liberté. Niant la conception selon laquelle il existe un double circuit culturel, l’un foulé par l’élite, l’autre par la masse, il considère que le système actuel dissout, par sa structure même, les cultures populaires dans le narcissisme de la culture de masse.
L'individu contemporain et son narcissisme
C'est vers la fin des années 1970 que Lasch entreprend ses recherches sur l'apparition d'un nouveau type d'individu caractérisé par une « personnalité narcissique » (en même temps que les travaux de Richard Sennett sur le « repli sur le privé »)8. Pour Danilo Martuccelli, chez Lasch, « le narcissisme comme figure sociale de repli ou d’implosion vers soi apparaît comme une conséquence de l’effondrement de l’autorité et des sources possibles d’identification normative ».
Bibliogaraphie
Pierre Ansay, « Christopher Lasch : Narcisse, nouvelle figure du capitalisme », Politique, revue de débats, Bruxelles, no 59, avril 2009, p. 64-67.
(en) Jeremy Beer, « On Christopher Lasch », Modern Age, 2005, p. 330-343. [PDF] [lire en ligne]
(en) Russel Jacoby, « Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) », Telos, no 97, 1994, p. 121-123.
(fr) Jean-Claude Michéa, « Pour en finir avec le XXIe siècle », Transatlantica, 2002. Il s'agit de la préface à l'édition française de La culture du narcissisme. [lire en ligne]
(en) Kevin Mattson, « The Historian As a Social Critic: Christopher Lasch and the Uses of History », The History Teacher, 36.3, 2003: 39 pars. [lire en ligne]
(en) Robert B. Westbrook, « Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism, and the Vocation of Intellectuals », Reviews in American History, Volume 23, Numéro 1, mars 1995, p. 176-191. [lire en ligne]
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