THE GENERAL DISORIENTATION

Abstract

The essay questions the situation of serious global impasse in which the world is today. This impasse is portrayed as engendered by the deep crisis of modern Western politics, and of its historical perspective, understood as a promise of emancipation of subjects. The general lack of a historical-political horizon, the disappearance of a true critical project, the meaningless that a policy reduced to the management of the liberal system engenders in its ruin, characterize this impasse. The question today is therefore that of a general disorientation. This defines the leitmotiv for gathering and articulating the different threads of events that map out our destiny today. These threads all bear the mark of the threat: that it is the expansion and the intensification of attacks of the Jihadist salafist in France, Europe or the United States, and the "co-radicalization" of the Islamophobic far right; or the current growth of new populists far right; or the "politics of things" (the new technocracy) of the Western system itself, reducing politics to the management of the system's affairs and choosing "security" as a technique of government. These threats are not all of the same nature, of course, and they are not equivalent. However, they all have in common the fact of attacking, in the last analysis, beyond collective solidarities, the subjective, singular life: the self. That is to say, more precisely: the relation of oneself to oneself and to the other of oneself, according to which only a subject can to draw oneself and maintain a "general line" throughout his life. So, under these different threats, the subject loses and loses (disorients) oneself on all fronts of the struggle. Stripped of its relation to itself, the threatened subject tends to be completely undermined: led, directed, managed throughout its existence. It follows the last compass of the survivor, in the time that is running: that provided by the resources of work which consists in taking up a relationship of oneself with oneself and with the other of oneself, a condition and principle of any possible orientation. Ultimate form able to oppose a resistance to the present time. Now, to elaborate these resources, to working-through them, is precisely the task of art, of literature, of thought.

KEYWORDS: art; other (of oneself); destiny; jihadist; emancipation; existence ; far right.