2023-09-02 05:00:00
Before the surge in September, an overview of the books that are already stimulating the debate of ideas, at the head of the gondola in good bookstores.
The back-to-school season starts early! Important books came out in mid-August: they animate the life of ideas and public debate. Before the surge in September, the “Ideas” section of Libé takes stock of the first works not to be missed.
worthy lives
In dealing with dignity, the psychoanalyst and philosopher Cynthia Fleury signs the back-to-school essay which strictly concerns everyone without exception. Who has not experienced at least once in their life a banal or seriously degrading situation? Privileged witness to human fragility through her work as a shrink, Cynthia Fleury shows in the Clinic of Dignity how much this value is considered inalienable to man, the guarantor of a sense of self. But we live in an increasingly unworthy world (megafires, climate change, social inequalities, dirty jobs, dirty treatment, etc.). Starting from this modern contradiction, Cynthia Fleury proposes to relaunch the dignity machine in a very convincing way.
Cynthia Fleury’s Dignity Clinic. Threshold, 224 pp., €19.50.
What distinguishes (or not) the human from the rest of the living
What unites human societies to all species? Why is the “homo” gender the only one able to free itself from its biological condition? In an unprecedented sum that reconciles life sciences and social sciences, sociologist Bernard Lahire attempts to identify the fundamental structures of human societies, which requires identifying patterns common to all living things: inequality, dependence, division of labor … Without justifying everything by biological determinism. The multitude of examples he cites reveals the existence of social facts everywhere in nature: from primates to bacteria, including plants, bees and meerkats. A social species among others, man nevertheless has the ability to accumulate culture, the only way, through continuous technological and scientific progress, to overcome the social limits imposed by biological constraints.
Fundamental structures of human societies by Bernard Lahire. The Discovery, 972 pp., €32.
Goldmania: so that we still love it
A literary comeback without Ivan Jablonka is almost as rare as a car trip without a Goldman song on the radio. Having grown up in his music and the France of the 70s and 80s, that of Rocard and the Restos du Coeur, the historian devotes to the artist, who has been away from the stage and the media for twenty years, his last “sociohistorical biography” in the like a collective autobiography. Without having been able to meet the musician or have had access to his archives, the author of Laetitia (2016) and Just Men (2019) delivers there with lyric-nostalgic sentences his very personal vision of the star of the music industry. French, or the symbol of a certain left – loyal to the working classes, social democrat, anti-racist way Touche pas à mon pot and republican – whose Jablonka, alter ego and spiritual son of the singer of Montrouge, deplores the disappearance today under the thrust of a more radical left, embodied yesterday by his half-brother, the revolutionary Pierre Goldman. At the heart of the book, the trial of a certain left-wing press, including Libé, accused of despising the tastes of the people. A simplistic boomer’s complaint or a moving plea, the book already annoys as much as it fascinates, whether or not you’re a fan of Goldman – and Jablonka.
Goldman of Ivan Jablonka. Threshold, 400 pp., €21.90.
Read our interview and review
Belief in the future, a new indicator of social inequalities?
Tell me how you see your future and I’ll tell you who you are. The precept summarizes in a few words the thesis of Nicolas Duvoux, sociologist, who publishes the Confiscated Future. The professor at Paris-8 and new president of the National Council for Policies to Combat Poverty and Social Exclusion offers in his book a new framework for reading social inequalities based on the feelings of individuals and their relationship to the future. The objective criteria, income, property assets or level of education, of course remain central elements for understanding the behavior of the French, but, he believes, these different variables all overlook something more intimate. , of the order of the experience of the “sensitive” proper to each of us. The relationship to time is socially differentiated depending on whether one is well off or underprivileged, explains Nicolas Duvoux in his book, an expression which refers to an air of the times and a collective feeling of abandonment, yellow vests who do not see the end of the month young people eco-anxious and anxious about climate debt.
The Confiscated Future of Nicolas Duvoux. PUF, 272 pages, €23.
You have to breathe
In an overheated world, Marielle Macé leads an investigation, from our small asphyxiations to our great needs for political air, on the unbreathable. Because, from the first to the last of our breaths, our thoracic machinery needs much more than oxygen but a complete landscape of things, people, words: a territory of aspirations and hopes. “The sincerity, the reality of an address, the presence with others in all the words, are part of what can make the air more breathable”, writes the historian of literature. A true ode to solidarity, the author calls for reconnecting with the breath of the other to finally be able to take a deep breath of fresh air.
Breathe by Marielle Macé. Greenfinch, 128 pp., €8.50.
Read our review and interview
Social inequalities seen through the ballot box
850 pages and two centuries of electoral analysis. With A history of political conflict, it is a new globalizing sum published by economists Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty. Who votes for whom and why? The two authors have crossed social, economic, territorial or identity variables and collected data at the level of the 36,000 French municipalities to reveal the social structure of the electorates of the different political currents in the country, from the Revolution to today. An ambitious undertaking for an unprecedented reading of ideological divisions? To be found next week in our pages.
A History of Political Conflict by Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty. Threshold, 864 pp. 27 €.
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