Governance. The status of victim has acquired such an aura in the opinion of Western societies that it gives those who speak out in its name a powerful means of pressure on the governance of institutions. Far from being purely moral, the phenomenon is a product of “societalization”, this new way of regulating behavior by subjecting it to the injunctions of civil society.
The #metoo movement is a good example of the mechanism. Long considered a “normal” expression of the difference in symbolic and practical status between men and women, sexist behaviors have been denounced as abusive manifestations of male violence.
Such reformulation was enabled by what the American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) called the publicization of the subject (The Audience and its problems, 1927), that is to say by the awareness by women that the macho acts of which they were victims went beyond personal experiences and concerned the whole of society. They trivialize the relationships of domination that structure an intolerable way of living together.
An exceptional skill
For a decade and alongside #metoo, discussion groups “publicized” many subjects: physical and moral harassment, abuse of authority, psychological manipulation, sexual or domestic violence, contempt for minorities and discrimination of all forms.
Following the same approach, individual acts are made public to denounce the institutional system that makes abuses invisible. Speaking out from private cases is not intended to “break the silence”, as is often said, but, on the contrary, to put common words to behaviors that were hitherto unexpressed because they were neglected.
A new political fact, publicity also reverses the classic logic demonstrated by René Girard (1923-2015) in particular (Violence and the Sacred, 1972), which makes the victim the passive scapegoat of public violence. On the contrary, it provides victims with an exceptional competence which authorizes them to publicly utter a word of authority. Hence the proliferation of victim discourses and the ever wider extension of the perimeter of victims, now including those of global warming, animals threatened by the loss of biodiversity, forests or the Earth itself, the ultimate victim of human activity.
An unstable climate
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