Bøger i The Sciences Po International Relations and Political Economy serien

Rereading Marx, Weber, Gramsci and, more recently, Foucault, Béatrice Hibou tackles one of the core questions of political and social theory: state domination. Combining comparative analyses of everyday life and economics, she highlights the arrangements, understandings and practices that make domination conceivable, bearable, even acceptable or reassuring. To carry out this demonstration, Hibou examines authoritarian situations—especially comparing the paradigmatic European cases of fascism, Nazism and Soviet socialism and those of contemporary China or North and Sub-Saharan Africa.

When applied to social science, psychoanalytic concepts make it possible to analyze totalitarian action and its derivative, authoritarian action, by highlighting what such regimes have in common: the destruction of frames of reference for space and time; their replacement of those reference points with a restrictive ¿surreality¿; and the assignation of individuals in the social space in terms of the love or hatred attributed to them by those in power. Whether in Stalinist Bolshevism, posited here as the matrix of the ¿totalitarian personality¿; in its extreme form of totalitarianism with the Islamic State; or in a more diluted variant in the Polish ruling party ¿Law and Justice¿ (PiS), each is characterized by the negation of temporal and spatial distance, and therefore by the negation of causal links, displacement and transformation of experience. These components are specific to the unconscious which, in dreams as Freud considered, acts upon factual datum, denies it, and reproduces it in another way, one that conforms more closely to the dreamer¿s desires. For this reason, the politics that arise from these regimes have much in common with a hallucination.