Unlike the Colombian people among whom she lives, Ariane Bilheran notes that the French constantly demand their dose of illusions. Recent outbursts of collective hatred and hypocrisy vividly illustrate this addiction.

Hippocrates reminds us that medicine is an art. Confusing medicine, which presupposes an empirical relationship between patient and doctor, with hard science is a misunderstanding that leads to the objectification of the other. Totalitarianism, which precisely seeks to objectify the human, necessarily engenders an ideology of "scientific" medicine bordering on sectarian blindness.

Reading note on Psychopathologie du totalitarisme, Psychopathology of totalitarianism in the journal Éléments by Rémi Soulié. If Plato and Aristotle, according to Pascal, "wrote about politics, it was as if to regulate a madhouse". Pascal did not believe he was right, for want of having known totalitarianism, whose canonical distinction with so-called liberal and representative democracy seems increasingly difficult to maintain for Ariane Bilheran...

Feelings are shrinking like shagreen leather; no one opens up about their feelings anymore, love is relegated to the cellar, even inner life is no longer of interest. This is Günther Anders's sad observation of the generations before the post-Covid dehumanization...

All totalitarian islets create their own "newspeak", for example within companies that operate by terrorizing, harassing and persecuting their employees. All totalitarianism lives off the conquest of "ideological pretension" (Hannah Arendt) and the "rectification of thought" (Mao). To overcome these ideological levels, which are increasingly moving away from the search for truth and knowledge, and to persecute opponents, the instrumentalization of language is necessary.

It is this very pretension to govern this bare life that has clearly emerged since the first quarter of 2020: restrictions on movement to the point of immobilization (lockdowns, isolation), the distance imposed between bodies ("social distancing"), the reduction of faces to the scopic impulse (the sole gaze), constrained breathing, etc.

Series in 3 episodes, published by L’Antipresse, n°286, 287 & 288 23 & 30 May 2021, 05 June 2021 - Translated by Thetranslationbridge.com Ariane Bilheran, normalienne (Ecole Normale Supérieure), philosopher, clinical psychologist, doctor in psychopathology, specialized in the study of manipulation, paranoia, perversion, harassment, and totalitarianism.