Arnaud Benedetti is editor-in-chief of the Political and Parliamentary Review and Associate Professor at Paris Sorbonne University. He publishes
How are the policies dead ?, The great malaise of power
(ed. Du Cerf, November 4, 2021).
In Marseille, against the backdrop of a manifest disorganization or casual organization, Eric Zemmour let his unconscious escape, which is never recommended for a man who aspires to lead or to participate in the management of a community.
Max Weber in the last pages of Le
Savant et du Politique
does not fail to point out that "
the absence of detachment (...) is one of the mortal sins of the politician
".
By responding spontaneously and on the same provocative register as a demonstrator taking him to task, Eric Zemmour failed to control the bubbling of his convictions, indulging in this "sterile excitement" in which the same Weber sees the mark of "Simple dilettante".
By positioning the bar of political demand at a height that he rightly considers to be the only legitimate one but whose abandonment he rightly observes, Éric Zemmour undeniably makes the right diagnosis, even though his solutions would sometimes prove to be true. questionable.
Arnaud Benedetti
De facto
, the pre-candidate committed the perfect double fault: that of not containing his passions and loosening control of his personality. The Prince in the Weberian sense which is not so far removed from the Machiavellian blueprint, moreover, must combine the determination of the cause and the corsetting of his being. It is clear that these two qualities are rare on a political scene convulsed by the electricity of the immediate. Éric Zemmour, whose whole work consists in reconnecting with the history and the
habitus
of great leaders, will have revealed an astonishing fragility in an exercise which does not suffer the slightest deviation.
Because the whole problem of the applicant is to have been able to grasp the obvious gap of the post-politics to which many, not to say most of his competitors contribute, to diagnose the symbolic flaw as well as the ontological impotence.
By positioning the bar of political demand at a height that he rightly considers to be the only legitimate one but whose abandonment he rightly observes, Éric Zemmour undeniably makes the right diagnosis, even though his solutions would sometimes prove to be true. questionable.
This reassignment of the political to its existential mission can only make sense if its incarnation avoids the vertigo of the society of the individual where no one would prevent himself, including the woman and the man aspiring to exercise the highest state charges.
Arnaud Benedetti
The Zemmourian observation penetrates the deserted areas of the State, public power and voluntarism, recombining a national synthesis that speaks both to the imagination and reactivates the idea of a return of the political in its willingness to act. .
But this reassignment of the political to its existential mission can only make sense if its incarnation avoids the vertigo of the society of the individual where no one would prevent himself, including the woman and the man aspiring to exercise the most. high state charges.
Rightly, Eric Zemmour had denounced certain postures of President Macron during a music festival at the Elysee or a trip to the West Indies. He had seen in it a form of immolation of the sacred or of the gravity that befits power. Communicators, never late for an analysis, did not fail to note the corrosive dimension of the image returned by this finger as untimely as it is dishonorable; in doing so, they do not see or refuse to see what their activity has deconstructed over several decades of the fundamentals of politics, of its capacity to represent overhanging and of its projection to inhabit society.
By dint of wanting to trivialize in order to gain proximity, the injunction of political marketing has turned against the object it intended to promote, reducing it to a product and above all delivering it from the restraints essential to its transcendence and consequently to its legitimacy.
Everything is possible now, including going beyond any form of the superego.
In his own way and after so many others, Eric Zemmour was also one of the new victims, he who developed the intuition of this deadly pathology ...
