Among French intellectuals, Pascal Bruckner is certainly one of those who best understands the questions that inhabit his contemporaries.
And that’s what he just did in his new book, The Rite of Slippers.
He worries about what becomes of the Western individual, this homebody slumped in his sofa, who consumes Netflix series on the chain, despairs when he does not find a new one to watch, and finds no more happiness than in sanitized private comfort.
Virtual
He takes refuge all the more in his house as the outside world seems to him more terrifying than ever, with the apocalyptic speeches à la Greta Thunberg.
Go further. Contemporary man is content with an increasingly virtual existence. The experience of confinement during COVID was probably a revealer and an accelerator of this new collective psychological disposition.
As we said, he watches TV series on the channel.
When he wants to interact with his contemporaries, he turns to social networks.
When he dreams of a little adventure, he turns to video games.
When his libido haunts him, he bets on porn. He is naturally enthusiastic about the metaverse.
In other words, he dreams of a decorporated existence, as if he were pure spirit.
It is not surprising, in this context, that so many of them believe that they can choose what they call their “gender identity” without taking their biology into account, as if the body were only a carcass, and sex, an arbitrary symbolic construction.
Distress
We flee reality to lose ourselves in a fantasy life, which is no more than an ectoplasmic double of existence.
We will not be surprised that psychic anxieties multiply in this context.
The crisis of meaning felt by many is nothing other than the alarm signal of a life protesting against its mutilation.