"Naming Evil" with Ariane Bilheran - about totalitarianism

Interview entitled "Nommer le Mal avec Ariane Bilheran" published on September 1, 2021.

About totalitarianism

One wonders if this "war" against the virus, announced by President Macron, has not become, through collapse, a psychological war against the people. Marion Bonny, a former military doctor trained in infectious diseases and in dealing with health disasters, has even filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court for economic, social and cultural genocide [1] ...

You specialize in the analysis of the art of manipulation and the pathologies of power.

Can you tell us about your background and how your studies allow you to decipher this news?

Ariane Bilheran:

I have always been immersed in environments of abuse of power, which led me since my adolescence to think about the abuses of power, first through moral and political philosophy (Hannah Arendt and Hegel in particular, then I did a master's degree in moral and political philosophy at the Sorbonne on the disease of civilization according to Nietzsche) and then from psychology (harassment, manipulation, perversion, paranoia).

For about ten years, I audited cases of harassment complaints in companies of different sizes, cultures, countries and sectors. This has allowed me to observe collectives when they become disconnected from reality and give way to paradoxical and sadistic discourses.

I am particularly interested in deciphering the mechanism of "delusional contagion" between individuals and within collectives, a mechanism that can explain in history the adhesion of peoples to totalitarianism and to various crimes against humanity. Moreover, my studies at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris, in Classics, gave me the basis to analyze sophistry in speeches, that is to say the presence of "false reasoning", when a reasoning seems true but is not. This corruption of reasoning is rooted in a loss of meaning in language. An example today is to qualifier as "non-essential" what is not actually "useful" from the point of view of capitalist production. Useful refers to a tool in the service of technical and/or economic production.

This has nothing to do with the essential, which speaks of our essence as human beings.

Art and culture in this sense are absolutely essential for our humanity. It is clear that the choice of words perverts or not the reasoning that uses them, and leads to a new, more abusive relationship with the world. I have also been interested for a long time in neologisms, that is to say in these "new words" which are often a marker of individual and collective madness, as Lacan had already spotted; "Complotism" is one of them.

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