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"We are at war: What is behind Emmanuel Macron's rhetoric?"

2022-09-08T14:30:41.327Z


FIGAROVOX / TRIBUNE - For the editor-in-chief of the Political and Parliamentary Review Arnaud Benedetti, the warlike rhetoric of the President of the Republic in times of crisis, excessive, ends up obscuring reality.


Arnaud Benedetti is associate professor at Paris-Sorbonne University.

He is editor-in-chief of the Political and Parliamentary Review.

He published

How are the politicians dead?

- The great malaise of power

(editions of Cerf, November 2021).

Communication is the continuation of politics by other means?

Really ?

The question must be asked, it arises all the more in the light of the communication of the President of the Republic who loves the exercise, even claims to dominate it, and does not hesitate to resort to it in a deliberately dramatized form. .

It is the latter itself that has imposed itself since the health crisis as the major note of presidential expression.

The rhetoric there is indexed to the will to drill ever deeper into the historical reference the legitimacy of the action of the executive.

But is it an action, in the same way that we are entitled to question the political nature of it?

For isn't doubting the first mechanically questioning the consistency of the second?

If we accept to consider what is political as the experience of the human will to control the march of history, it is clear that crisis after crisis, Emmanuel Macron is the most advanced illustration of the degradation of the communication policy.

Social crisis with the "yellow vests", health with the pandemic, energy with the Ukrainian episode, economic with the return of corrosive inflation: the succession and multiplication of these episodes bear witness, if necessary, to a loss control under the pressure of events certainly of a varied nature, some of which are difficult to avoid such as the pandemic, others avoidable, such as concerns about electricity production and gas supply, but all of which reveal an obvious lack of anticipation, notwithstanding alerts sometimes launched in vain, and this for years.

Postmodernity was a world in transition where words, even weakened, still retained a meaning inseparable from the flesh of reality.

Arnaud Benedetti

Macronism alone cannot be held responsible for this fall in politics, but it is certainly the most advanced stage of a degeneration of which it is the product.

Macronism cannot be reduced to the postmodernity with which some would like to identify it.

It is beyond, in the sense that it signifies that postmodernity has completed this work of

“spectacularization”

of society that Guy Debord had detected in his time in the throes of the generalized commodification of the world.

Postmodernity was a world in transition where words, even weakened, still retained a meaning inseparable from the flesh of reality.

Quite simply because their use was based on historical experience and the close transmission of the latter.

Post-postmodernity operates this changeover where reality no longer adheres, fiction takes precedence over the materialities of History, including those of anthropology.

Reality is thus negotiated, reminding us of what the distant father of public relations, Edward Bernays, said of himself when he called himself a

“dealer in realities”

.

Emmanuel Macron, in his own way, creates a parallel world where words are overused, uprooted as they are from their meaning born of History, demonetized from the solid gangue of lived experience to liquefy in an exclusively communicating lexicon without any relationship. with reality.

Macron's war is a screen war, a convenient alibi to hide all these years of messy globalization of which he is as much the culmination as the continuator.

Arnaud Benedetti

When he mechanically refers to war, both during the epidemic and now on the threshold of a funny new energy ordeal, the President dangerously denaturalizes the warrior phenomenon, appropriates it artificially in order to subvert its definition in the goal of exacerbating the dramaturgy of the moment in order to better radicalize its perception, exaggerate its representations, increase its acceptability through abusive comparisons.

All in all, if we are at war, we must therefore "pay the price", which is that of consent to all the potential deprivations of liberty, of the right to basic goods, etc.

The warrior frame of reference comes from a semantics whose deliberately anxiety-provoking functionality aims to get us used to the extension of the domain of restrictions, to impute its movement to the exception of circumstances, whereas this exceptionality results from a chain attributable to responsibilities. policies that have been sedimented for decades.

Macron's war will not take place, or if it were to take place, it would reveal the somewhat hollow noise of the vacuum of action replaced by the neurotic hubbub of communication.

It is not in fact the continuation of a policy by other means;

it is above all the continuation of the presidential communication from another

storytelling

which replaces the optimism of the "new world", the narration of the very beginnings of the first term, with the historicized narrative of a world occupied more with its survival than to his future.

The happy promise is followed by the uneasy prophecy.

Macron's war is a screen war, a convenient alibi to hide all these years of messy globalization of which he is as much the culmination as the continuator.

It is a war waged on the harsh truth to maintain the flow of propaganda communication.

The paradox is that it is operating at full speed 30 years after the founding act of the neo-ideology of the technocratic elites: the referendum ratification on the thread of the Maastricht Treaty.

Everything happens as if it were necessary at all costs to continue to maintain this thread...

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2022-09-08

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