“Bardella addresses the inhabitants of the civilization of the cocoon and the egocene” – L’Express

L’Express: What do you think characterizes the “egocene”?

Vincent Cocquebert: For forty years, what I called the cocoon civilization in a previous book has been thriving, where everyone, in a defensive movement, takes refuge in withdrawal into themselves, whether spatial, physical, ideological or even territorial. It is a historical sequence and a phenomenon that spans all generations and that has its source in the working classes since the 1980s, who were the first to experience this domestic withdrawal, a form of micro-secession. From this decade, that of the democratization of the cult of the self, of performance, of personal success, political discourses have become much more categorical. We have since witnessed a fragmentation of politics, a certain end of utopias that has fueled the feeling that there was no longer really a common destiny, and that the ultimate quest was internal.

The Egocene, this transition from the grand narratives of democracy to the small personal narratives of intimocracy, is the response to this civilization of withdrawal. By dint of having domiciled our existences thanks to digital technology (from work to consumption via culture and meetings), we experience the feeling of being the great organizers of our small worlds and we are less and less able to create a constructive dialectic with the exterior and otherness. From now on, we no longer wish to adapt to the world, it is he who must resemble us and bend to our desires. As a result, the individual experiences himself, in an obviously totally illusory way, as a monad detached from any common destiny. Everyone sees themselves as their last utopia. Obsessed by the quest for our own singularity, by security, comfort, well-being and each other, we experience a certain “end of the other” whose strangeness threatens us and which seems to be an obstacle to the fulfillment of our desire. The translation of the Egocene into politics is in fact the conviction that my own destiny is separated from a collective, common utopia.

Withdrawn into our desires and keeping others at a distance, have we killed politics?

I don’t know if we killed it but we miniaturized it. That’s the whole meaning of this phrase hammered out like a mantra in recent years “the intimate is political”. It is probably partly true but what we observe above all is that today we have a lot of intimacy, of feeling, but very little politics. Hence this obvious frustration of not really living in a world “in our image”. Hence also this very current obsession (in fiction but obviously in politics) for “identification”. You surely heard during the election campaign, this phrase in the mouths of many voters: “I don’t quite find myself in…”. It is significant of an end of politics, it reflects the advent of a civilization that passes only through affects, impulses.

We are also witnessing an ultra-specialization of the small political niche, with the emergence of parties such as the animalist party, or, in another movement, the creation of ultra-targeted programs on our fears, our anger and our frustrations for reach a particular clientele or community, thus flattering several major trends of the time: narcissism, consumerism and an intense culture of anger, which I called “angry-culture”, because cultivated (by politicians, unions, the media) in the almost agricultural sense of the term. Today, moreover, we are no longer “in struggle” or “on strike”, but “angry”.

Hence the electoral success of the 28-year-old neophyte, who has never governed, Jordan Bardella?

The president of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella, knows how to capture part of this youth, because this youth, which is anything but a homogeneous progressive group as has long been fantasized, finds it reassuring to have a politician who communicates like them, who uses the same social networks as them, who travels and lives in the same digital worlds as them, and this without clumsily pretending, as candidates from other much older parties try to do. If Bardella is like us, then let’s vote for him. This movement signals the end of ideologies but also a certain decline in the level of education. The politics of emotion, the politics of incarnation, makes way for programmatic corpora, which no one cares about, because all that matters is resemblance and identification. By speaking only of security, protection of the individual sphere, and distancing oneself from the other – this stranger who does not resemble me and therefore threatens me -, Jordan Bardella addresses the inhabitants of the civilization of the cocoon and the egocene, he touches them. This is all the more powerful because for the first time in our history, a generation is emerging that no longer believes in a desirable future, and which therefore has no refuge other than “the quest for self”. Which, at a time when professional and sentimental spheres are increasingly uncertain and chaotic, finds in consumption with an identity and existential vocation an escape, obviously excessively fragile and uncertain.

In this short election campaign, we heard a lot of voters say that they would vote for RN, a party “that we haven’t tried yet.”Has electoral suffrage become a form of consumption?

In any case, it works on these same dynamics of artificial narcissism at a time when politics is, however, for citizens, but also and increasingly for politicians themselves, an experience of powerlessness. Politics is in fact today the reign of intimocracy. In the era of small stories, small feelings, solutions to small problems, Jordan Bardella is on a par with these small promises and gives some people the feeling of speaking to their hearts. In fact, the society of mass customization is also that of the extension of the Barnum effect, or so-called well effect, in all directions. This psychological process of subjective validation that makes us perceive our mirror in the general and which takes place, for example, when we read our horoscope and we have the feeling that it has surrounded us. These vague but most often positive or rewarding statements that give us the feeling that someone is talking about us, and to us. An “illusion of the self” necessary for our need for internal coherence which, today potentiated by the bubble of social networks, largely feeds the current attraction to identity militancy and populist policies which are ultimately a defeat of thought.

The strong participation and the two million proxiesdo they not partly blame you?

I believe that this mobilization comes not from a return of politics but from a hysterization of the moment, from a fantasy of a clean slate and bright tomorrows, which above all risks generating a lot of disappointment and frustration. We want to destroy this hated system, without really knowing what we could put in its place. The nihilistic impulse often prevails unconsciously. Voters did not evaluate technical programs or figures, they did not compare promises or solutions to our country’s problems, they did the sales. We are in the “everything must disappear, you must disappear” situation. Behind this dynamic of purge, the era of the Egocene seems more relevant than ever to me because the two central themes of these weeks of improvised campaigns remain identity and purchasing power, and the two respond to each other in a sick dialectic since purchasing power is obviously more than ever synonymous in our society with “the power to be oneself”. The left does not offer an alternative to this model of existential consumerism and the RN, even while playing on an imaginary post-materialist identity, in reality only mobilizes a folkloric vision of France. I am struck to what extent this polarization of political choices reflects an electric climate, unprecedented violence.