In his column of March 14, entitled “An existential war”, François Brousseau tries to demonstrate that the deep reasons for the invasion of Ukraine are not limited to questions of geostrategy. It would rather be an “existential war”, which sees Russia attacking “a certain conception of civilization” and “capitalist and Western decadence”. To show signs of the deep roots of this conception, he quotes the patriarch Kirill, close to Putin, who says precisely that all this “goes beyond political convictions” and that it is a “war in the metaphysical sense “. From the mouth of the patriarch follows the example of Western gay parades, which illustrate this decadence and justify associating the Western world with a civilization of “sin” which must be fought or at the very least pushed back when it seems present themselves at the gates of Russia. Undoubtedly, Kirill is also, and perhaps above all, concerned about the penetration of this culture within Putin’s kingdom itself.
This summary of the Russian situation has a funny smell of already felt, even always felt, and this, not only in Russian news, but in the West and even beyond. Indeed, such “existential wars”, which are the fruit of reactionary counter-attacks, appear constantly in the four corners of the world. Let’s draw from recent news and from a place not so far away. In Florida, the Don’t Say Gay Bill is a counter-attack aimed at the teaching and representation of sexual diversity during the first years of primary school. But in its deepest roots, does not this bill also drink from the source of a fight against sin? That is to say against the decadent transformations of an increasingly diverse modern world threatening to smash the institutions, and their representations, which were the base (of a certain idea) of a past civilization ? Are these deep roots not found, as in Putin’s Russia, in an ideological soil where the religious and the political (and sometimes by extension the military) go hand in hand or, to put it like François Brousseau, where there is “alliance of the sword and the bottle brush”?
Since at least the birth of the Tea Party, and especially since the election to the presidency of this disturbing American oligarch who has never hesitated to praise Putin, the deep motivations of the actions of the American right in terms of education and its attacks on the rights of women and all minorities who contribute to diversifying the country of Uncle Sam are beyond doubt. Obviously, there is also a form of “existential war” going on. And in the minds of many, it is she who will make it possible to make America great again.
The invasion of Ukraine is in fact just another illustration of the confrontation between the four corners of the world between a, let’s say, traditional representation of the world and a, say, modern or progressive representation of the world.
Traditional thought
At the heart of this traditional representation is the idea of a necessarily vertical and ideally permanent world where a powerful leader sits at the top of the States, guardian of the national identity and of what constitutes the features of this identity in terms of beliefs, social structure, social roles, but also gender identity, sexual mores, in short what would constitute the spirit of a people. But make no mistake, this is only a representation of the spirit of a people. Traditional thought does not know that it is fighting for a chimera. For her, the truth is one with the representation, because she has a horror of the relative, the ambiguous, the unpredictable and reassures herself by convincing herself of its clarity, its permanence and its absoluteness.
Opposite and at the heart of modern representation is the idea of a world tending towards a constantly changing horizontality and within which each individual seeks to flourish by defining his values, his social roles. , its identity traits, and this, ideally, in a solidarity that does not do without the notion of responsibility towards the other. It matters little, moreover, the traits of the identity and the value of the gestures of the other.
To evoke Sartre’s famous formula, let’s say that traditional thought believes that essence precedes existence. Modern thought asserts the opposite. Understanding this tension between traditional and modern representations sheds light on today’s world. In Ukraine and Florida of course, but in so many other places.
This tension is at work in Zemmour’s electoral campaign, in the attacks on representativeness within the republican states, in the mock election orchestrated by Ortega in Nicaragua, in the repression of Afghan women, but also in the drafting of a new Constitution in Chile, in the struggles of indigenous peoples, here and elsewhere, for the recognition of their rights to self-determination, and even on a smaller scale and without it appearing, in the popular assemblies where the t determines the vocation of a park or an alley.