A reading of Corine Pelluchon’s Lucas Prize lecture, with Bernanos’s two priests and Adler’s idea of encouragement.
Head of a goddess statue, probably Aphrodite. Roman, 2nd century CE, found at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens. Marble, ivory, bronze. The oxidised bronze eyelashes have left tear-like streaks. Athens, Acropolis Museum; shown in “Broken. The Power of the Fragment”, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. Photo: Siegfried Lautenbacher
A gaunt young priest drinks bad mulled wine. At the end comes the sentence “All is grace.” That is what stayed with me from a film I first saw in 1981, at seventeen: Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest”. The film is based on Georges Bernanos’s novel of 1936. I only read the novel at about twenty-four, and I have read it so often since that I almost know it by heart. Later came Bernanos’s first novel, “Under the Sun of Satan”.
I thought of this priest while reading “Transdescendence, Ecology, Democracy”. The book is by Corine Pelluchon, who teaches political philosophy and applied ethics at the Université Gustave Eiffel near Paris. The slim volume grew out of her lecture on receiving the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize in Tübingen, and Mohr Siebeck has published it in open access, in German and English. In the chapter on hope, Bernanos appears: “Hope is, as Bernanos says, ‘despair overcome.’”
A Lecture in Tübingen
The prize commemorates the rabbi Leopold Lucas, who died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943. His wife Dorothea was murdered in Auschwitz in October 1944. Pelluchon opens her diagnosis with the first sentence of Adorno’s “Education after Auschwitz”: “The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again.” Her question is how we are today “to prevent the recurrence of the worst”, under the pressure of ecological, political and geopolitical crises.
To answer it, she defends the Enlightenment together with its self-critique. For her, the Enlightenment is an ethos of questioning the present for its dangers, and an “unfinished process”. Anyone who invokes it today has to keep Auschwitz, Hiroshima, colonialism and the ecological crisis in view. She asks what, “both within the psyche and within socio-economic structures”, stops people from relating to the world differently. In Individual Psychology I work on a related question: how what a person has lived through and the circumstances they live in together shape the way they respond to the world.
The Schema of Domination
Why did the Enlightenment not protect us from the worst? Pelluchon looks for the reason in a pattern older than capitalism. She calls it the Schema of domination. Domination operates in a threefold manner: over other people, over external nature and over our own nature. The concept lets her connect phenomena that are usually treated separately: capitalism, totalitarianism, bureaucratisation, the reification of animals and extractivism, the plundering of raw materials. At its core she sees “the rejection of our embodied and vulnerable existence”. Aggression is directed “toward those associated with corporeality and vulnerability: women, children, and animals”.
The second step leads through Ernest Becker to the denial of death. Becker was an American cultural anthropologist. His book “The Denial of Death” (1973) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974, two months after his death. Pelluchon takes from him the idea that the denial of death is a “cultural invariant”. Awareness of our own mortality causes such terror that we repress it. For Pelluchon, the costs explain “why we so often act against our own interests, why environmental protection encounters such resistance today, and why polarization and nationalism are increasing across the globe”. People “convert their powerlessness into an illusion of omnipotence”. She counts compulsive consumption and climate scepticism among these defences.
She goes furthest on the treatment of animals. “Cruelty toward animals is not a marginal phenomenon that merely provokes indignation; it is a mirror of what we have become.” Growing used to animal suffering makes us indifferent to the pain of all those who are not “like us”. A culture that denies death spreads it. Pelluchon calls it a culture of death.
Why Neofascism Seduces
Adolfo Wildt, “Dux”, 1923. Bronze. Made for the Casa del Fascio in Milan and struck with pickaxes during the Liberation in April 1945. The exhibition reads the blows as damnatio memoriae, an attempt to erase the dictator’s image from public memory. Carlo Eleuteri Collection; shown in “Broken. The Power of the Fragment”, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. Photo: Siegfried Lautenbacher
From here she asks why people submit to far-right leaders. In her view, poverty or a lack of education does not primarily explain it. What matters is “the feeling of being disoriented and the difficulty of accepting the loss of traditional reference points”. “Many people feel interchangeable, even superfluous.” With Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, she describes what agitators make of this: a “reverse psychoanalysis” that deepens unease, offers scapegoats and turns powerlessness into an overwhelming sense of power. The leader promises “a vicarious form of immortality”.
Adolfo Wildt portrayed Mussolini in bronze in 1923 for the Casa del Fascio in Milan. During the Liberation in April 1945, people struck this face with pickaxes. Today the bust stands in the Florence exhibition with those marks. I see in it the promise of permanence and the attempt to revoke it by destroying the image. The feeling of being superfluous, which Pelluchon sees behind people’s susceptibility, does not disappear with the image.
More than a hundred years ago, Alfred Adler described where such a feeling can lead: from the inferiority feeling to the fiction of godlikeness. With him in mind, I read Pelluchon’s diagnosis as something familiar in a new language. Adler does not appear in her lecture; her authorities are Ernest Becker, Wilhelm Reich and Adorno. I am interested in what Individual Psychology, which asks what behaviour is for, can add here. I will come back to that.