What is wokism, according to some of the most recent essays published in France? For the psychologist Gad Saad, it is “a virus of thought”, an American evil which contaminates the Republic. Economist Nicolas de Pape (Everything must disappear) sees in it a nihilism “at the center of a cultural revolution never seen in contemporary history”. The journalist Carine Azzopardi speaks of the “hide of Islamism”.
Cultural sociologist Nathalie Heinich adds apocalyptic hyperbole even to the title of her new essay, Is wokism a totalitarianism? (Albin Michel).
“The anti-totalitarian sensitivity is very strong on the left”, explains in an interview with the Duty the researcher member of the Observatory of identity ideologies. “In France, the left has been deeply traumatized by what happened to the communist movement — namely 50 years of denial of the crimes of Stalinism when the anti-Stalinists were right. Personally, I think that we are today in France in a position similar to that of the Communists of 50 or 70 years ago, who, when they dared to speak of the gulag, were treated as agents of big capital . »
Really ? Isn’t there a rhetorical device, a Godwin point, a reductio ad Hitlerum (Or Stalinum)? “Obviously, wokism is not a totalitarian regime, as people try to make me say who take me for an imbecile”, replies Mme Heinich.
“We are not on a woke diet. But there is a totalitarian mentality, where we find for example the compulsory assignment to a community, the systematic preference given to ideology rather than science, and the passion for censorship by the cancel culture. »
In her book, she speaks in fact above all of an “atmospheric totalitarianism” using a formula from Gilles Kepel attached to jihadism. Mme Heinich also took part in the seminar Violence and dogma political scientist Kepel at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris on May 31, by not publicizing his lecture to avoid demonstrations by enemies of academic freedom.
A depoliticization?
What are we talking about ? What exactly is she talking about? Wokism is described in the essay by Mme Heinich as “a systematic injunction to awaken to all forms of discrimination against minorities, whether ethnic, religious, sexual or otherwise”. These struggles are obviously associated with progress and justice.
A fundamental link is established with identitarianism. This notion treats each individual according to a community to which they belong which would at the same time be a victim community—that of women, blacks or indigenous peoples, for example.
“It is this tendency to interpret the whole of the social world in the light of a communitized conception of the world and a somewhat primitive binary division — between dominant and dominated, victims and culprits — which constitutes wokism”, specifies the sociologist in interview. “We are sometimes criticized for putting everything and anything under this term, but it is because everything and anything is used by the promoters of this current. »
Fierce critics cast a wide net, too. For its opponents, the umbrella notion houses approaches from the social sciences (gender studies, for example), methodological tools (intersectionality), ideological currents (decolonization) and social movements (#MeToo).
The wokists are active above all at the university (and even then, above all in the departments of human sciences) and in the cultural world. Sociologist Heinich, who has devoted thousands of pages to the study of historical and contemporary culture, arts, and artists, speaks of places driven by the privileged that can focus on symbolic struggles.
“We are faced with a form of derealization of the world, a form of depoliticization — or rather overpoliticization — on symbolic issues which is accompanied by a depoliticization of real issues. »
Instead of fighting with women from the suburbs of Muslim origin delivered to the community pressure of the Islamists, “the supporters of inclusive writing therefore prefer to demand that we write author or author”, adds Ms.me Heinich. Instead of taking action against socio-economic injustices or environmental issues, wokists “proselytize for transgenderism or transidentity, denounce an essentially imaginary colonialism, a so-called state racism,” she says.
An instrumentalized term
However, no intellectual openly declares himself a wokist. The term woke, like its derivatives, also has a bad reputation with neo-progressives who see it as a caricature reduced to a few excesses, a weapon of massive depreciation of their just causes. Not to mention that the successful cancellations of books or shows more often come from the right in the United States.
The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, candidate for the Republican nomination for the next presidential election of the United States, has moreover only this word in his mouth to attack the liberals and the democrats. In fact, he uses the adjective woke (“awake”), but not the noun wokism, a French specificity.
The word meant to designate a political-ideological movement has been used more than 5,000 times in French media since the first occurrences at the end of 2020. ‘Atlantic, was one of the first to beat up this ideological piñata.
Mme Heinich does not even mention it in the bibliography of his book. “He is very brilliant on the subject, but I am not at all on the same line as Mathieu Bock-Côté from this point of view,” she explains.
“I want to break this identification of antiwokism with the right by showing that even if wokism defends perfectly legitimate causes from a progressive point of view, against injustice and discrimination, it does so in such a way that we cannot cannot follow it without regressing and betraying the values of the left. »
She writes that we can fight wokism without refusing the fight against discrimination. On the other hand, she persists in believing that what is given to read in university courses or shown in museums must be based exclusively on value and not on the identity of persons. “The causes at the start are legitimate,” she sums up. But the way to defend them can totally [les] mislead. »
All this is not very jojo. And yet, the book closes with a call for humour, recalling that several controversies have focused on the question of caricatures. Woke sectarianism would be impervious to laughter, like the Stalinists of old. “The big difference between wokes and antiwokes is that antiwokes are capable of humor,” concludes Nathalie Heinich.