How can we explain the astonishing unconsciousness of President Macron, the scandalous, unconstitutional absence of government for over a month? He went mad, some say, at the bar counter. Obviously not. The president is in himself what he has always been, a disciple of Paul Ricœur (1913-2005).
The philosopher had always had an inability to find his way in space. He never found his way, neither in Paris nor in Préfailles. I had almost lost him when we had gone together to the Opera to attend the Saint Francis of Assisi by Messiaen, in the early 1980s.
This topographical disorientation, which is not agoraphobia, is a rare handicap from which he suffered all his life, which made him feel self-conscious and certainly contributed to making him this caricature of an intellectual locked in his ivory tower, determined never to leave it again, to nourish his philosophical works with readings and only readings, without taking into account what was happening outside.
Too much awareness of awareness kills awareness
This is how, during the five years of captivity in the Gross-Born camp in Poland, he would spend his time translating the book by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, Guiding ideas for a phenomenology. Legend has it that, not having the necessary paper at his disposal, he wrote his translation on the margins of Husserl’s book, more than 800 pages constituting the foundations of this science that claims to be new and purely descriptive of the structures of consciousness: what consciousness is made of and how it is made, what it is, and how it works. Every time Paul tried to make me understand this, an axiom came to mind: too much consciousness of consciousness kills consciousness. In other words, I had the impression that phenomenology was a way for Paul to escape from what I believed to be “phenomena”: manifestations, emanations of reality. For me, I told him, phenomena are the life of reality. But I saw from his smile that it was more complicated than that. And then, I felt that he did not like this concept of “reality”.
To translate Husserl in captivity for five years, in the way he spoke about it and confessed it openly, was to abstract oneself from the painful reality in which he found himself, a prisoner, and which he did not want to think of as such: reality. Husserl was perfect for that since it is precisely one of the principles, one of the experiences of phenomenology, “epochè”, the suspension of judgment. Paul applied it thoroughly, this suspension, to excess, and that is why, in his captivity journal, we do not find the slightest trace of his suffering person, not the slightest evocation of the pain of separation from his family, nothing on the conditions of existence, in the concrete sense of the term, the food, the sleep, the cold and the other prisoners. The only intrusion into the world: he gives lectures on the national revolution at the Cercle Pétain, which is to say how disconnected he is.
It is as if, by dint of thinking about the world, he forgot to think about the world, the one that surrounds him, in which the thinker finds himself. But this “putting into practice” of phenomenology, this deductive application is an abuse, a drift, a perverted turn of Husserl’s thought. It is the Ricœurian trick, the one that will allow Paul to consider himself as another. And this is probably what seduced Macron: the suspension of judgment, the epochè, which he uses today at will. He prevents himself from judging, from deciding, from choosing, he thinks so much about power from a phenomenological point of view that it escapes from it and escapes him.
He no longer has power, he is in power, paralyzed, inert, but at the height of his narcissistic enjoyment, in a sort of little presidential death. It cannot last, but the fact of having decreed the Olympic Games as the vacuum of power further complicates the return to Earth, which is the most perilous operation in the conquest of space.
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