How Emmanuel Macron's language dissipates reality, by Justine Augier
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As part of her participation in the "Les Rendez-vous d'Effractions" series at the Maison de la Poésie (Paris-3ᵉ), the writer Justine Augier sends us this text on the semantics of the President of the Republic during his last televised intervention.
This article is an op-ed, written by an author outside the newspaper and whose point of view does not reflect the editorial staff's views.
It's a bit of a pain every time, but I try to force myself to do it, to listen to political leaders when they speak to "address" us, to listen to their language. On the evening of May 13, Emmanuel Macron presented himself for more than three hours as an omniscient man and guarantor of the facts: "I don't want people to be told nonsense," "I stand by the facts and figures," "that's reality , " "that's not true , " "I never promise people what isn't possible."
Facing his interlocutors, he does not battle on the terrain of ideas, preferring to claim to return to what a priori does not contradict itself, "the facts" , to what makes any criticism suspect, to what could even create unanimity and the absence of alternative. He brandishes documents, tables and curves, thus trying to divert from the way in which he manipulates and overturns reality, neutralizing his interlocutor who is too busy reestablishing the premises of the discussion.
Macron goes back to "explaining" the pension reform that his opponents seem to be struggling to understand, before returning to this reversal: "I was elected in 2022 with a pension reform, with a figure that has nothing to envy of many of my predecessors." When Sophie Binet [general secretary of the CGT, editor's note] points out the obvious: "Opposing you was the far right! Even I voted for you," he continues: "There was no hidden copy, did that make me lose in the first round? No. So there was democratic validation."
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Exercises of this type follow one another, nothing new, and then, in the middle of the program, seven minutes are devoted to Gaza , seven minutes out of three hours and eleven minutes, wedged between "Too many standards!" and "How can we better fight drug trafficking?", seven minutes launched by the testimony of a doctor whose gaze is still imbued with what he has seen, and after which [the journalist] Gilles Bouleau asks this question: "Does what is currently happening in Gaza constitute genocide?"
Gaza? "It's a tragedy and it's horrible""It is not up to a politician to use these terms, it is up to historians in due course," Macron replies. It is up to lawyers to try to characterize the facts, to punish but also to prevent, something that "in due course" refuses to do, three words that defuse the burden of the present, evacuate for an indefinite period the question of responsibility and complicity, evacuate the political.
When Gilles Bouleau points out that historians, notably Israeli ones, use the term genocide to describe the crimes committed in Gaza, Macron retorts: "It's a humanitarian tragedy and it's unacceptable," and then he says: "It's a tragedy and it's horrible," repeating it three times, as if to compensate for the vanity of all the words of the same type already uttered without leading to any action, he repeats this indeterminate "it is," without gender or number, neutral, abstract, which dissipates reality, says nothing about the crimes and the suffering.
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