In his new essay, The Dignity Clinic (Threshold, collection “The countdown”, 224 pages, 19.50 euros), Cynthia Fleury, the founder of the first chair of philosophy at the hospital, warns of the trivialization of “ordinary indignity” and calls for go beyond indignation to rebuild a politics of dignity.
You describe a new civic sensitivity to dignity. How does she express herself?
The demand for dignity federates today even more than those for equality and freedom. We see it in the movements of “yellow vests”, Black Lives Matter against racism, #metoo against sexual violence or in LGBTQIA+ pride marches. They not only express a demand for recognition, but claim the equal value of human lives, including those defined by stigma. Because they are often excluded from a majority world that has been sold to them as universal, these men and women demand the unconditional respect due to individuals from the outset.
The demand for dignity is also at the heart of the discourse of caregivers and debates on the end of life, where it appears as the ultimate guarantor of the material conditions of care but also of respect for the desire and freedom that each individual wants to exercise up to the end of life. ‘to death. The fear of “falling” one day into a situation of indignity – or judged as such – is old. But a new anxiety is becoming more and more present in our Western societies, that of being obliged to behave in an unworthy manner towards others, because the system no longer allows you to do otherwise. It is found, for example, in children of elderly parents who fear “behaving badly” by putting them in an nursing home.
The institutions that guarantee people’s rights and dignity – hospitals, justice, schools, etc. – are paradoxically on the front line in these denunciations…
It is not a coincidence. Since the end of the XXe century that we conscientiously unravel the functioning of our public services, our societies have become systemic factories of new forms of unworthy situations. Caregivers, magistrates, social workers, prison guards are many to say “no longer able to do their job with dignity”. While they are involved in these institutions to accompany individuals in the ordeal, they are led, for lack of time and means, to participate in unworthy situations. They bear witness to the same “ethical suffering”this feeling of participating in a system of dupes where there is no choice but to feel bad or give up empathy.
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