In the series Fever (Canal +), Eric Benzekri describes a society where extremes of all sides are just waiting for a spark to set society ablaze. It’s a headbutt and an insult – “dirty toubab” – delivered by a football player to his coach which will set things on fire. By immersing us in the world of communicators and social networks, the series highlights the virality of the most passionate reactions and their deleterious effects on already highly polarized groups.
The fever that grips members of the same nation is a matter of indignation and anger against a backdrop of irreconcilable ideologies. On the one hand, the far-right identitarians who see in this aggression the expression of anti-white racism which has become the acme of the process of “decivilization”; on the other, the far-left identitarians for whom the act, as violent as it was, would be the symbol of the emancipation of a racialized man having finally broken the chains of systemic racism. And faced with these two conceptions which look at each other like iron dogs, ready to do battle, a heroine, capable of probing the fault lines which shake society, will do everything possible to avoid civil war.
The immense merit of this series lies in the extraordinary tension that it transmits to the spectator who watches, helplessly, as the implacable ideological machine is set in motion. Merit, but also limit. There is no reason to deplore this, it is the lot of all fiction to simplify reality. No story will ever be able to restore its complex singularity. Because between the series and reality, there is a slight difference, which makes all the difference. It is the polarization which serves as a framework for the six episodes. If civil war is so imminent, this can be explained firstly by the adherence, on both sides, to beliefs, dogmas, conceptions of the world and society, which can only collide. . Ideas versus ideas; theories against theories. The fever is ideological.
Lack of consistency
Is this really what we observe in society? There is reason to doubt this when we listen to flesh and blood activists. The identitarian defends an identity that he is incapable of defining. And for good reason, belonging to our societies is not reduced to an essence, but extends to anyone who embraces its values. The racialist is not more coherent who, from safe spaces in single-sex meetings reestablishes a segregation that it claims to abolish in the only countries where it no longer exists. The declining environmentalist, torn between his fight against climate change and his hatred of technology ends up preferring coal to nuclear power. The neo-feminist no longer knows how to define a woman, so much so that he dreams of perfect equality between two members who are unknown to him.
The list could extend endlessly, as all these ideologies are so similar. Because their apparent opposition betrays a common background: that of having none. How else can we explain that young students who block universities in the name of defending oppressed peoples see genocides everywhere except where they are perpetrated? That the defenders of equality and parity rebel against the violence of patriarchy only in countries where women are best represented politically and economically? And that sovereignists defend the rights of peoples to self-determination except in cases where they are invaded by an external power?
Sleepwalker rather than believer
To support such contradictions, the theoretical basis must be soluble in political action. In what way the modern ideologue is not a believer but a sleepwalker. What characterizes it is not an idea that is too deeply anchored, but the illusion of an idea; which will be all the more attractive as it can be transformed according to events. Hence the sudden transformation of environmental activist Greta Thunberg into an activist for the boycott of Israel. After all, what does the motive matter as long as there is struggle and indignation. Because the goal is never to fight in the name of an idea but to choose the idea that morally absolves the desire to fight.
There are therefore no ideological conflicts but a desire to fight which makes ideology an alibi. The activists do not propose anything else. One would look in vain in their words for the outline of a new society or the slightest reform. On this point, they are silent. The only society against which they rise is also the only one they can imagine, the one in which they live and which they castigate. This is why they have nothing to say about real genocides, do not rebel against dictatorships and have not a word against warlike or polluting states.
For those who only desire the great wars of the mind, only the societies that have already won them are truly unbearable. Hence a hatred which takes as its object the only places in the world which undermines its so-called legitimacy. The sovereignist will hate the sovereign country, the racialist and the identitarian the one who makes the other an equal, the ecologist the one committed to the environment, and all will hate democratic and liberal societies, that is to say say Western. Reason why beyond their apparent opposition, all the ideologues without ideal – pleonasm – attack the same target and reinforce each other.
And therein lies the threat of conflagration. Not from an ideological fever but from the confusion of the feelings of individuals condemned to hate what they adore.
*Pierre Bentata is a lecturer in economics at the Faculty of Law and Political Science of Aix-Marseille.
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