The philosopher from Nîmes, who was close to Paul Ricoeur and teaches at the Faculty of Protestant Theology in Montpellier, publishes De l’humiliation.
You are publishing a new book entitled De l’humiliation. Why this theme?
I have given several courses on this subject for twenty years, but recently I noticed that the students were very touched, very concerned. It’s a very broad, very social subject, which affects institutions, history, war, but also intimacy, life in families.
Finally, he is a good analyzer of changes in society. A good witness. My basic thesis is that we are very sensitive to injustices, to violence but very little sensitive to humiliations when they are very deeply devastating. They damage beings, seriously and lastingly. This lasting aspect struck me: the characteristic of humiliation is that one does not react immediately.
Because we do with it?
The proprieties of our society, the dominant morality, is to say “it doesn’t matter, it’s just words”. We make it a subjective thing. While it exists and the suffering is real.
You describe school as a humiliating institution…
There are relationships of verticality as in any institution, but also a way of comparing and competing… The dominant value for children is not to be humiliated. As a result, we will humiliate the weak. It is not wanted by the school, but as soon as we put people in competition, it is the result obtained. We are here in the passions of language. Comparison, vanity, envy… It is the speaking subject that is in question.
Bio express
Olivier Abel is a philosopher, former dean of the Protestant faculty of Paris. An accomplice of Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Lévinas, he is one of the specialists in the “imaginary function of speech”.
He has been teaching at the Faculty of Protestant Theology of Montpellier since 2014 after having spent thirty years at that of Paris.
He directs several doctoral students at the Paul Ricoeur center and regularly hosts conferences, as very recently in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is the author of many books. In Nîmes, Olivier Abel is a member of the Nîmes Academy.
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There are less humiliating alternative pedagogies…
Yes, and there are also teachers sensitive enough not to allow horizontal humiliations between classmates. But humiliation can also exist in the family, between brothers and sisters. And then there is this new deal that is the horizontality of social networks. Either by exclusion, or by the dissemination of disqualifying photos or remarks. We shouldn’t trivialize it and get out of this discourse that says “it doesn’t matter, he’s going to break his skin”.
Our societies in Europe stem from two traditions stemming from Stoic Greek morality and Christian morality. Both advocate a certain modesty, a certain indifference to the opinions of others. This double tradition makes us somewhat insensitive to the humiliations that we inflict on others. Arab world or Japanese societies are honor societies. Losing face is serious. In our societies, we have fun making people lose face. Including through humor which can be a weapon of war.
Formerly humiliation was servitude. Today is exclusion
The world of work can also be a humiliating place…
The threat of unemployment drives people who are afraid of it to submit to abusive management. Management has certainly changed a lot over the past twenty years, there has been progress. But we still tend to show all individuals that they are replaceable, we break attachments.
Flexibility brings suffering. And then a lot of people feel unemployable. They have been trained for something that is no longer useful and they are made to understand that they are the ones who are no longer useful. Formerly, the form of humiliation was servitude, slavery. Today, it’s exclusion, rejection. The worst thing is not throwing someone away, it’s letting them wear themselves out holding the bond when in fact no one cares about them. It will isolate itself, to protect itself from being considered a negligible quantity all the time.
Either we are in it, and we are pressurized by this “formatting”, or we are superfluous… We must be sensitive to this double direction. There was the tragedy of the master and the slave, there is a new form of tragedy, that of exclusion. I would even add the category of those who still have three sous and are reduced to their social utility, that of being only consumers. It is also very humiliating.
It’s also because the ties in society have come undone…
Yes. A society is also a theater in which we show who we are, in which we perform in front of each other. There are places, different, it can be in a petanque competition, in anything, there are places to have the pleasure of playing at existence.
Negative humiliation is what positive recognition is: but both take time. These are parallel circuits. People need bread and retribution, but also meaning, recognition, a little consideration, approval. To be approved in who I am and in what I do.
We must accept to be more vulnerable, unprotect ourselves, be more sensitive to each other
And in the political space?
There is an opposition between two relationships to humiliation. Those who are in, who are optimistic, in the system and assume that everyone is letting go of the ballast, return to this ideal of emancipation which was that of the left and which has become the liberal ideal in the very broad sense of the word. It is an ideal of accepting change, flexibility, etc. However, we have seen with the “yellow vests” that some cannot let go of the moorings, that they have ties.
Finding a good society where, for it to work, everyone would have to cast off, it’s just a dream! On the other side, there is a whole discourse that values the nostalgic relationship to old ties, to old loyalties, to the land and which manipulates resentment. I find that very cynical, because it’s not going to change anything. We would have to change the entire paradigm. You have to rebuild free links. One has attachments that are diverse, but held freely. We are not attached by servitude but freely attached by fidelity, by solidarity. I’m not going to let go of my friends, my ex, my old parents…
If it was a global culture, it would be better. It is necessary to rethink emancipation in order to renew free ties and detach from servile ties. The more one protects oneself from humiliation, which is a poison, the more one becomes humiliating for others. You have to accept being more vulnerable, unprotect yourself, be more sensitive to each other, that’s almost a policy: think about a finer dialectic of openness and closure.
“Wars are enormous factories of humiliation”
Olivier Abel’s book was published before the outbreak of the Russian war in Ukraine.
“Wars are huge factories of humiliation, often stemming from old humiliations. They come one or two generations later to pay for previous humiliations: between France and Germany, the humiliation of Sedan, that of the Treaty of Versailles… And how did we succeed in Europe in getting out of the logic of humiliation?
The French weren’t triumphalist, even if they were probably a bit too much, and the Germans managed to bring about a separation between them and their leader… Which is fundamental. That’s what it takes for Russia today, or maybe Turkey tomorrow, to make the distinction. We must be careful not to punish the peoples, this is the problem of economic warfare which makes no distinction and can have the effect of reuniting the people with power.
This is the difficulty of democracies which refuse to look war in the face. We are arms dealers, we think about war economically, without doing it. What is happening is a good lesson. You have to learn civil self-defense, not just how to over-arm yourself. Huge weapons can do nothing against a people who resist.
Olivier Abel also evokes migrations: “Major population displacements are also sources of humiliation. Gaston Bouthoul the polemologist said: “Wars are great migrations in the afterlife”… These displacements create refugee camps which are the wars of tomorrow: all these children growing up in refugee camps, in border areas, what do they know about peace? All these child soldiers in the DRC, in Africa… What will they do tomorrow?
The subject of words also questions the philosopher: “There is a language of humiliation, you have to use victory knowing that you may not always be victorious. That’s wisdom. And use defeat knowing that we won’t always lose.”
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