It’s Christmas and you’ve had a bad year. You don’t like football, you take the RER B every day, you caught the Covid three times while your unfaithful spouse, nothing. In short, you really want to yell at yourself, to stretch your glottis. In addition, there will be the cousin with her insulting piercings and her proto-woke looks, the uncle with his calloused hands and his racist ideas, your daughter’s boyfriend who pretends to be trader and loves showing you stuff on his computer, in short, all these stereotypical characters that the media bring out every year to try, sluggishly, to give a little momentum to their papers, yes, this one is no exception and that’s for you annoys even more.
Don’t panic, we have something to trigger the fry. Here are the articles that can help you prepare for the worst, to read at the station while waiting to find out if your train is maintained despite the strike.
1. Wokism
It was already the winner of the year 2021, but it’s coming back for a second season because it’s proven its tenacity, with its waves and variants (and it’s entered the dictionary).
Our woke-French dictionary “This singer calls himself woke, but he’s not really an SJW; he is an undeconstructed cis-hetero who has made his mark on cultural appropriation. » If you have not understood this sentence, this lexicon is for you.
What is happening in American universities? American campuses are readily portrayed as places subject to postcolonial, feminist and minority movements. The French academics who teach there, however, describe a more contrasting landscape. Survey.
Where does the word woke come from? The injunction to stay “awake” permeates the culture and the psyche of the black community in the United States. From anti-slavery, drawing on the Gospels, to Erykah Badu, via Marcus Garvey, a look back at the origin of the term.
Is identity a new dictatorship? In a polemical essay, Laurent Dubreuil recounts the growing influence of identity claims in the United States. And worry about it because “to assign an individual to an immutable place is to reinforce the domination that one claims to be fighting”.
“Race and social sciences”: investigation into the debate which is tearing the university apart When the French Minister of Higher Education had asked for an investigation into “Islamo-leftism” in the faculties, “the Obs” had leaned on the controversies surrounding the concepts of race, gender and intersectionality.
What) “woke” are you ? Take our test To find out if your attitude towards discrimination and inequality is likely to make you difficult at cocktail hour, take stock…
Sample topics: Should Adrien Quatennens return to the Assembly? Is having blue hair the end of civilization? How to reconcile the fact that men have a life expectancy lower than that of women with the idea that they would be the dominant ones of the patriarchal system?
2. Naturopathy
Your aunt swears by alternative medicine, detox cures, the fast she does every summer in the Basque Country and above all… her naturopath. When at the time of bringing the cheese platter, and after a first salvo on the vaccines, your cousin dares to pronounce the name of Irène Grosjean…
The excesses of naturopaths: from detox to intox More and more French people are turning away from conventional medicine in favor of alternative practices. This universe, which is too little regulated, nevertheless shelters a large number of pseudo-therapists who can prove to be dangerous.
Pseudo-syndrome, delays in diagnosis… The excesses of pediatric osteopathy Beneficial, useless, or downright dangerous? Osteopathy for infants arouses the concern of part of the medical profession. Investigation into the rise of a vague and poorly controlled discipline, which thrives on the misery of French care.
Irène Grosjean, investigates the methods of the star of naturopaths At 92, the doyenne of naturopaths, follower of raw food mixed with a New Age spirituality, is the embodiment of the worst excesses of the milieu. relatives of elders “patients”, some of whom have died, recount his methods. And the hold she was able to exercise over them.
Sample topics: Does conventional medicine have blinders? Is nature always right? Granules with sugar, is it a medicine? Can you beat cancer with juices and mindfulness meditation? Is the Covid a gaiaesque divine punishment for the industrial excesses of our civilization?
3. Onfray-Houellebecq-Zemmour
According to classic biblical exegesis, the horsemen of the Apocalypse are four, but as France is in decline, it is content to have three. This year, like every year, we still talked about Eric and the two Michels.
Dialogue Houellebecq-Onfray: the great relaxation The latest issue of the magazine “Front Populaire” released on Tuesday November 29 opens with a long dialogue between Michel Onfray and Michel Houellebecq entitled “End of the West? “. “The Obs” read it for you.
“Anéantir”, Houellebecq’s most politicized, most Catholic and… most failed novel In “Anéantir”, published at the start of the year, the writer imagines the presidential campaign of 2027 and wonders about the end of life while announcing the death of the West.
According to our count, Zemmour and Onfray agree on 92.7% of the subjects. We watched three debates between the reactionary columnist and the libertarian philosopher. Both mourn the decadence of our civilization, our lost sovereignty and the Machiavellianism of Pope Francis. They don’t agree on Voltaire and fridges.
Is Houellebecq on the far right? Five traveling companions analyze his political evolution While the author of “Submission” was collecting his “Interventions” in the press, we asked five writers and journalists, from Frédéric Beigbeder to Aurélien Bellanger via Nelly Kaprièlian, to talk to us of his relationship to politics.
In the mind of Eric Zemmour: deciphering a deadly ideology His idols are the far-right theoreticians who appeared at the end of the 19th centurye century: Barrès, Maurras, Bainville… Despite the lessons of history, the polemicist revived ultranationalism, xenophobia and even anti-Semitism. While proclaiming the inferiority of women.
Sample topics: When did Michel Onfray start to spin, before or after his book on Freud? Is Houellebecq a prophet or an aesthete who has a hard time? To say that he has a soft band, is it to enter into a virilistic imagination carried by Eric Zemmour? Was the Reconquest candidate just a media bubble?
4. The trans movement
Surprise: your cousin sent an SMS to all the guests at the Christmas meal. “I now want to be called Ivan. Please respect my gender identity. » No one dared to answer him, but on family WhatsApp channels everyone has questions.
The trans explained to your parents The trans movement calls into question evidence that is well anchored in our societies, including the idea that the world is divided between men and women. Explanations.
How the Covid put us in trans In “Dysphoria Mundi”, Paul B. Preciado describes the effects of the pandemic on our existence. For the Spanish philosopher, we have all become political bodies and are beginning a transition towards a not necessarily so dark future.
“I wanted to be King Fergus” : in France, the complicated journey of trans children Born as a girl, Ruben, 14, has always felt like a boy. Born a boy, 7-year-old Lily maintains that she is a girl. Like them, more and more minors in France say they were born the wrong way.
“Sex defectors are the only ones who have seen the world from both sides of the gender border” Trans people experience an evolution of their social status: trans men experience, to a certain extent, an ascent while trans women undergo a downgrading. This is one of the lessons of the first book by sociologist Emmanuel Beaubatie.
“We denounce Wikipedia’s treatment of trans, non-binary and intersex people” A column signed by forty personalities, including Jul Maroh, Paul B. Preciado, Virginie Despentes, Céline Sciamma, Rokhaya Diallo and the National Transgender Association, denounces the stigmatizing behavior against trans, non-binary and intersex people, on the online encyclopedia.
Trans, homos, feminism: another psychoanalysis is possible After feminists and homosexuals, now psychoanalysis is attacking trans people. A group of philosophers and psychoanalysts denounces this drift and recalls that “the unconscious is not made up of general laws, but of singular threads”.
Sample topics: Are trans MTFs not men who would like to benefit from the symbolic advantages now given to women? Do you have to have a vulva from birth to claim to be a feminist? Can a director make a film about a trans story without being trans himself? Basically, what is trans? Shouldn’t we follow Dionysius the Areopagite’s advice and “rise in silence” because any expressed category is violence and reality is trans? Should we ask for pronouns?
5. Sandrine Rousseau
She lost the congress, but not the war, let’s bet that Sandrine Rousseau will find the means to brighten up our conversations at the end of the year. The Christmas dinner – with or without meat – will perhaps be the occasion to test the law that now bears his name: any conversation that lasts more than fifteen minutes tends towards a 100% probability that his name will be mentioned.
Sandrine Rousseau, the permanent flash Each of her interventions, on feminism, the barbecue or in the Bayou affair, triggers passions. For her opponents, the member for Paris is the face of a radical and excluding ecology. For her supporters, a pioneer who rightly shakes up society. Avant-garde or provocative? Investigation of a political phenomenon.
“We need a boost such as we see in times of war” Emanuel Macron? “A total scam. » The ministers ? “They live in a parallel world. » The ecofeminist MP, who assumes aim “a social and ecological utopia”had exposed his vision of things to us in a blunt interview with “Obs”.
What is ecofeminism? Could there be a link between sexism and global warming? We explain to you where the current of thought that Sandrine Rousseau claims comes from.
Androcene, right to laziness… Do you speak Sandrine Rousseau? The Green MP is often at the origin of themes that fuel public debate. Small dictionary of a very political vocabulary.
But why did we torture and burn witches? For philosophers and ecofeminists, who rehabilitate witches, these persecutions were a key step in the advent of capitalism. Explanations.
What to say to your brother-in-law who will say at Christmas that we are going through a “serious crisis of masculinity” ? Francis Dupuis-Déri, professor of political science, deconstructs the “tenacious myth” who wants men to go wrong.
Sample topics: Rousseau or Bayou? Rousseau or Roussel? Red meat: should you eat it, yes or less (tip: say that from now on, you eat “good” meat)? Is the rotten weather we currently have not a sign that we are doing a little too much about the climate? Does Sandrine Rousseau have a sense of humor? Is humor a domination? Is Sandrine Rousseau a media creature? Can you be an ecofeminist and go to Greece every summer? Wouldn’t feminists twist the witch hunt story?
