There are books that pierce your heart, revive your neurons, others that are reread as life passes. There are also books that relate to del. THE del is a Persian word which says both the belly and the house of the soul – the nerve center of the truth of all Man. THE del is nestled in the belly and responds to the nerves and heart. When we simply have a stomach ache, we have a pain in our delbut we also have the del in tatters after a heartbreak. What I want to save, by Peggy Sastre, is a book that directly provokes del.
Dear reader, I’m not going to lie to you: Peggy Sastre is as essential to my emotional balance as to my mental hygiene. Sastre is a hunter of intellectual comfort, a guard dog of tribal vicissitudes, a salutary non-conformist. So when Peggy Sastre finds herself face to face with the pogroms of October 7 and unravels, the situation is serious: “Since October 7, all these bricks of my intellectual identity, what I am in short, give me the impression to cross the landing strip of an anvil I don’t know what common ground, even digging from one side of the planet to the other, I could find with a guy who calls his parents to tell them. to be proud of him because he has just killed ten Jews with his bare hands.”
Peggy Sastre wants to save liberalism born from the Enlightenment
After October 7, should we accept that “tribalism is indeed the way humanity functions”? Exactly, no. Peggy Sastre wants to save the liberalism born of the Enlightenment, in other words “compromise, debate moving towards a truth, a common reality, progress”, she wants to turn the tide. And what horrifies him are the packs who think that the end justifies all means. It then seeks to rebuild the dikes which will prevent us, in the future, from reaching this point – to the taste of blood, to what invariably ends up as a mass grave. And to remind us that “hate does not have love as its opposite, but indifference. Tolerance, to use a more polite word”. And to recall Diderot who wrote in 1745: “From fanaticism to barbarism, there is only one step.”
And to describe carefully what not dangerous when it comes to neofeminism which forgets the fundamentals – equality in law for men and women – to become a revanchist fight, a supremacist desire which hardly hides a struggle for power, a biological negation, a childish puritanism which ends up wanting to “grant women the only rights and benefits of freedom while wanting to protect them from its risks and responsibilities – especially when it comes to sexual freedom.” Women end up being considered as beings of exceptional fragility: “You want to ruin the life of someone who, de facto, does not disturb yours in the least? Say that you are doing it for their good and, If the pill still doesn’t work, say that it’s for the company.”
Sastre reflects on total freedom of expression
Here we are with condescending neo-feminism. She shakes us, Sastre, when she thinks about total freedom of expression. Yes, I know, it’s counterintuitive, but the studies are there (there is not the slightest correlation between restrictive laws against freedom of expression and a reduction in discriminatory behavior), the History is there ( before Hitler came to power, German legislation severely punished hate speech, particularly anti-Semitic speech). In short, it reminds us that reason and critical thinking, all this political pragmatism is “a difficult undertaking, so many fragile buildings, which a group of European scholars had decided to build to allow world to live better.
And she still finds a way to make us touch her intimacy, her doubts, her guts which twist before the Islamist massacres, her heart crushed before the injustice of the manhunts, her endives, her family, her abortion, like her rape, without for an instant falling into victim protection. By closing What I want to savewe are reassured and armed: everything is not ruined and there are still people who think that, to resist obscurantism, the fairest path is always that of the ferociously humanist Enlightenment. Fiercely.
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