In Red light district. Pleasure and the Left (Flammarion, 2023, 240 pages), an essay first published last year and which has just appeared in paperback format, the French philosopher Michaël Foessel poses a burning question: “Must one, to criticize the social order, refuse the pleasures it authorizes? When you’re on the left, do you have the moral right, despite everything, to be happy?
This question has bothered me since I was a teenager. While children are starving and people, even in our wealthy country, are dragging the devil by the tail, would we have fun spending our superfluous money on pleasure trips?
My Catholic upbringing and my later socializing beliefs made me allergic to such behavior. “If there isn’t enough for everyone, there shouldn’t be enough for me,” said trade unionist Michel Chartrand. Founded on an injustice, pleasure loses its value.
“To enjoy in an unjust world, asks Foessel again, isn’t this legitimizing in the most intimate way, in one’s body, the inequalities? “The question has been pulling the left since its origins, notes the philosopher. Voltaire pleaded for luxury; Rousseau advocated austerity.
Closer to home, Gilles Deleuze claimed not to “give pleasure any positive value” because it put an end to the desire for change, for justice. “He who feels pleasure, explains Foessel, tells himself that that’s it, he got what he wanted and — here begins the bad politics — that there is nothing else to desire than what the world already offers. »
Faced with pleasure, would we therefore be condemned to the following alternative: accept to indulge in it in the logic of current consumerism, thus consolidating the current state of things, or refuse it by devoting ourselves “to an ascetic protest against an unjust world”?
The right to pleasure without constraints, despite everything that is going wrong elsewhere, is the choice of a certain right that wants to be uninhibited, and the ascetic path is that of a certain woke left that highlights “the requirement to act well in a corrupt world”.
Foessel recognizes in wokism the merit of “a welcome awareness of consciences to the multiplicity of injustices”, but he criticizes its guilt-inducing puritanism, harmful to the struggles of the left. “If progressive asceticism is doomed to failure, it is because, like any asceticism, it wants to change life by having given up transforming the world. »
Refusing both adherence to “pleasures henceforth entirely formatted by capitalism” and “ascetic temptation”, the philosopher therefore pleads for a third way. Inspired by the symbol of the French Socialist Party, which consists of a fist, for combat, and a rose, for happiness, his proposal aims to reconcile the left and pleasure by defending an “alternative conception” of the latter, focused on its “emancipatory dimension”. The pleasure compatible with a left perspective, he explains, is that which escapes the individualistic and capitalist logic of return and which can be shared.
To want to change things, to reverse injustice, we need to have a “positive horizon” in view, to live a “sensitive experience which attests that another social organization is really possible”. Confinement in the unhappy conscience leads nowhere. To find the energy to fight, the neglected of the current system must be able to live experiences that make them aware that their misfortune is not fatal.
The horizon of the left, during the XXe century, the other possible world was the very real communist regimes. They lost all power of attraction when it was discovered that they were trampling on human rights and imposing sadness on a daily basis.
The desirable horizon, today, does not go through that. However, the one who must replace it, to mobilize, must already be perceptible in reality. The left, writes Foessel, must “bet on the emotions that make consciences happy without making them satisfied”.
A leftist pleasure, suggests Foessel, is a disorganized party, close to home, where all the participants are actors and not spectators and where one can drink, smoke and, I might add, eat fries and hot dogs; they are loves indifferent to social classes, art made by people whose job it is not, a joyous strike and a laugh turned against the ridicule and contradictions of the masters of the world.
The left will not win by pitting asceticism against the toxic pleasures of exploiters and polluters. It will only rally the dissatisfied if it manages to reveal that the society defended by its adversaries is not only unjust, but flat for the majority.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature in college.