Chantal Delsol, Insurrection of particularities, Le Cerf, 2025, 315 p.
Chantal Delsol's latest book is remarkable for its broad perspective, as it manages to make the major issues of postmodernity intelligible by placing them within the long term of history and a global geopolitical framework. The philosopher synthesizes her previous reflections on the decline of the universal and the pathologies of Western democracy, while focusing more specifically on the new power of minorities. Not without ambiguity, "the insurrection of particularities" refers both to the resistance of national identities to new imperialisms (China, Russia) and to the identity politics that fracture Western nations. We will use it only in this second, negative sense, which merges with wokeism. This movement thrives against a backdrop of a crisis of the universal and the decline of reason, substituting nihilism, narcissism, and sectarianism for science and civic conversation. Delsol lucidly highlights "this preference for relativism which paradoxically signifies intolerant thoughts" (p. 151).
Without claiming to account for all the analyses, nor to follow the plan of the work, we would like to highlight the major concepts likely to illuminate the woke phenomenon, as it currently rots intellectual life and institutions: renunciation of the universal, decolonialism, egalitarianism, inclusion, subjectivization of morality, dictatorship of identities, redefinition of democracy, systemic thinking, radical nominalism, decline of reason.
RENUNCIATION OF THE UNIVERSAL
The West has always aimed for "the universal common," an inseparably intellectual, political, and moral project, doubly rooted in nature: science seeks the truth of natural laws, while emancipation satisfies men's moral aspiration to freedom, constituting a "universal of promise." But this universalism is today being challenged: the conviction of the equal dignity of all cultures prevents us from valuing our values better than others—thus, a section of the left defends the burqa because all cultures are equal. The root cause of this abandonment is the triumph of will over nature: the postmodern individual, who only legitimizes the products of his will, can only produce the particular. The universal is the unveiling of a truth that precedes me, while the particular refers only to the one who constructs it. Because the universal is the unveiling of a truth inscribed in nature, one cannot invent or fabricate a universal order through thought. From the moment we want to find nothing, but to create everything, we are doomed to remain in the particular. Therefore, let us not be surprised that other cultures do not recognize in our societal laws the products of a universal, because they are only the constructions of a particular culture. The desire for emancipation has given birth to a new world, claiming to deconstruct all anthropological markers: filiation, the distinction of the sexes, the border between man and animal, man and machine, and soon death. "The desire for emancipation has become a desire to emancipate oneself from the principle of reality and the general human condition." (p. 16) Each culture withdraws into itself and even human rights, which we thought were universal, are rejected in many countries, because they are based on one belief among others: the belief in the dignity of the human being. The West's choices are based on Judeo-Christian culture, and when that culture fades, those choices shift. Universalism ceases to be a truth and becomes just another narrative—a myth.
DECOLONIALISM
The abandonment of universalism leads to considering Western values as cultural particularities, which it would be imperialist to try to impose on other peoples or on our fellow citizens of foreign origin. Thus, secularism, although at the foundation of the values of our Republic, is increasingly considered a colonialist concept, to the point that the State must deploy "secularism referents" everywhere, as the idea is no longer self-evident. We are seeing the emergence of a "provincialism of thought" and an "active tribalism," with each group wanting to overtake the others. The individual merges with his tribal group, identity is collective, and responsibility is transferred to the group.
The decolonial movement combines two branches of nihilism: 1) Western nihilism, made up of self-hatred and guilt. European culture is characterized by its ability to recognize its past mistakes, so that our capacity for criticism—which was our strength in the past—allows us today to hate ourselves. 2) the nihilism of the formerly colonized, who want to destroy the West because it has made their culture unviable by comparison.
However, decolonialism is a form of narcissism: by fueling the idea that it alone is guilty (of colonialism, of slavery), the West finds a way to unduly aggrandize itself, and it is a strategy to remain the only actor in history. This attitude amounts to infantilizing other peoples, who are not responsible for their actions.
On the contrary, the Chinese do not benefit from the narcissistic advantages linked to the colonization they suffered; they prefer to hit back, preferring warmongering to victimization. Generally speaking, Asians do not join the chorus of history's victims. Chinese universalism, based on the concept of "Tianxia" ("all that exists under the sky"), consists of deploying a soft power after the humiliation of colonization – it is expressed in particular in the Silk Roads project. Instead of colonizing, China establishes hierarchies of civilization with peoples deemed inferior. China and Russia do not claim to impose their civilization on us, but consider it to be far superior to ours. On the other hand, they conquer the countries they consider already theirs (Taiwan, Ukraine). With the same paternalism as China, Russia conquers out of love and not out of hate, like a father reunites his children. The West reserved the right to intervene wherever human rights were violated, becoming an empire without an emperor; similarly, China and Russia reserve the right to intervene militarily at their pleasure, because of their superiority. However, these two empires do not recognize their responsibility in the crimes of either Stalin or Mao. Document No. 9 warns against "promoting historical nihilism" by anyone who challenges the official version of history. In Turkey, Omar Pamuk suffered the same ban when he was brought to justice for discussing the Armenian Genocide (under Article 301 of the Penal Code).
Thus, the defeat of Western universalism reshuffles the cards of global geopolitics: it allows empires (China, Russia) and other nations to develop, claiming their identity and power (Turkey, India).
EGALITARIANISM
Universalism is all-encompassing, and therefore unequal, since it consists of valuing certain principles or values, considered legitimate. Once the universal is abandoned, all cultures are equal in their irreducible differences. Relativism involves leveling not only cultures, but all moral hierarchies and all values. The only good is the equality of beings and behaviors. Equality, the great moral principle of the West, has produced its excess, egalitarianism, which in turn has undone all its principles, starting with the universal and rationality: the laws of all countries are equal, pseudo-scientific principles are equal to scientific ones, and so on.
This egalitarianism is particularly evident in the dispute over canons that erupted in the United States in the 1980s. The canon is a criterion of excellence that gives rise to a hierarchy of forms and beings. But from the moment any hierarchy is perceived as violence and discrimination, the canon is denounced as a myth, fabricated by power-hungry men. In reality, the canon also reveals a need for role models, and its rejection reflects the certainty of finding one's own criteria for behavior within oneself.
A corollary of the hierarchy of authors and works, meritocracy is based on a hierarchy of talents. However, criticism of meritocracy, more vigorous than ever, dates back to the middle of the last century, when Michael Young, in The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958), invents the word and denounces the fact. Indeed, meritocracy reveals natural inequality and returns each person to what they are truly worth. Inequality of opportunity, due to the arbitrariness of birth, had at least the virtue of fostering the myth of natural equality. By criticizing merit, we hope to save this myth, failing to realize it. Michael Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit (2021), in turn, describes the pressure generated by a merit society. Young asks why value is placed in IQ and not in kindness, sensitivity, or courage. Delsol responds: because these values, erected as criteria, generate societies of the Savonarola-style moral order.
The superiority of merit is particularly challenged by identity politics, which values everyone equally regardless of their merits. The presupposition of equality of talent and ability extends the belief in the ontological dignity of all, prohibiting the existence of any aristocracy of merit. Society is composed of equally brilliant individuals, engaged in ruthless competition of geniuses (because if everyone is the best, there is no longer a best). To prioritize applications, merit is replaced by affirmative action, offering the best positions to representatives of each group (race, sex, etc.). But this equalization program penalizes truly deserving people—and affirmative action has been on the wane in the United States since the Supreme Court's June 2023 decision.
INCLUSION
Egalitarianism is a Christian virtue gone mad: the equal ontological dignity of all men becomes their real equality. Like hierarchy and the canon, the very idea of norm is rejected: there is no longer any norm, everyone is normal. "Inclusion," which has become the cardinal virtue, consists of conferring all value on the individual in order to remove it from groups. Practicing inclusion in school means denying the notion of a "good student" and therefore denying the weakest the chance to catch up. Instead of asking everyone (according to their means) to adapt to the environment, the environment must adapt to each person, which is the opposite of integration. With the disability studies and fat studies, disability and obesity should no longer be treated, since these are categories invented to arbitrarily discriminate against individuals.
The utopia of inclusion envisions a society of evangelical perfection, where the unfathomable dignity of each individual eclipses all their concrete characteristics, where "every human being is regarded with the loving gaze of God." A "society of archangels." As a corollary, like Marxism, so-called inclusive thought has an urgent need to vilify and condemn. Deeply intolerant, inclusion constantly excludes all its opponents.
A SUBJECTIVE MORALITY
The paradigm shift comes from Machiavelli and Hobbes, who founded modern political thought and viewed society as the struggle of all against all—or a war between equal particularities. In natural morality, good was connection and evil was separation; in modern morality, good is equality and evil is domination. This new morality found a pioneering application in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the first systematic expression of the struggle of all against all: Mao's regime tortured and killed men accused of belonging to evil categories (intellectuals, property owners, reactionaries). Similarly, the wokes humiliate and socially kill people accused of being white or male. The individual is accused not for what he does but for what he is, as under Nazism and Communism. Here and there we find the same Manichaeism, the same designation of the guilty, the same social ostracism. Society is still conceived as the struggle of all against all, but now the struggle is not directed against injustices or oppressions, but against Injustice or Oppression, with the idea of eradicating all evil from the world. Good consists of seeking equality in the struggle against dominations. The struggle is no longer a means to reach paradise, but is confused with existence itself since there is no longer any paradise. In a desperate quest for hidden dominations (that is, invented, fantasized), all social relations are translated into terms of power and the seizure of power. In this inversion of finalism, the world is no longer the sign of God's goodness, but of an evil will, according to an apocalyptic conspiracy. The world is bad, only the self is good.
With the collapse of churches and states, identity-based collectives have taken over and dictate morality. From now on, the individual decrees and defends morality, is both the architect and beneficiary of morality. The goal of this morality is not respect for others or the community, but happiness and respect for the individual. What is moral is that which prevents the individual from suffering, brings them happiness, and satisfies their desires. In the wake of Rousseau, morality is no longer objective and universal, based on the bond between humans, but individual and subjective, based on feelings and resentment. Ultimately, morality merges with individual desire, and the imperative is addressed to others: "Be moral toward me!" Or rather: "Recognize my suffering! Recognize me as a victim!" But what glory is there in being a victim? "Victimization is the recognition of the poor, who have no assets to show for themselves." » (p. 33). According to the mechanism of resentment identified by Nietzsche, the subject finds in this posture the justification of his powerlessness and the strength to hate those who harm him: "they are bad therefore I am good." The postmodern era of the victim establishes the recognition of all individuals, of all groups who, unable to gain recognition through positive actions, claim respect and admiration in the name of their defeat and their virtue. Morality replaces force.
THE DICTATORSHIP OF IDENTITIES
The recent invention of the adjective societal, moreover poorly formed (we do not say proprietary ni identity), which concerns society insofar as it affects private life (the social referring to common life), alone describes the takeover of particularities. From now on, man is no longer freed from economic exploitation, but from morals, family, institutions or taboos. Societal issues occupy the entire media and social terrain. The class struggle is replaced by the conflict of identities. In this generalized navel-gazing, identity groups cannot build any political will, but only defend what they are. These groups break up into smaller and smaller subgroups, because everything can be identified: groups are created for undocumented immigrants, adopted children, suicidal people. Politics is reduced to taking into account a litany of identities, whereas politics is first and foremost the art of living together. Individuals no longer gather together among different people united by the same goal, but among similar people to affirm their identity. Their being is their only reason for being, the fascination with their own essence. The purity of the collective identity makes each person a specimen; it is according to their type that each person will be judged, victimized, and sometimes admitted or not to university.
Under the Ancien Régime, the penalties were different depending on whether the offense was committed by a nobleman or a peasant; this community justice had its defenders, such as Jean Bodin (great jurist of the 16th centurye century), against the proponents of universal justice. Today, identity-based collectives demand privileges, and in doing so, place themselves above the law. But to claim that behavior is moral or not depending on the identity of its perpetrator amounts to denying morality.
The triumph of particularities and the struggle of all against all give rise to forms of anarchy, to the extent that the accumulation of subjective rights decivilizes and breaks the common. Since powers are weak, active minorities rush in and noisily occupy the place, in school curricula, associations, assemblies. Minorities take power and consider themselves the only ones justified in doing so, only minorities are justified in governing: "A legitimate state will not be the representative of the people, but the representative of minorities." Minorities demand a form of legitimate anarchy, but no order can emerge from their demands; they crack the social cement, while waiting to tear down the walls themselves.
REDEFINING DEMOCRACY
The obsession with domination is such that there must no longer be a majority, because the majority is perceived as domination. But the dictatorship of minorities is a denial of democracy, a reversal of the criteria of representation. Democracy is no longer defined as the sovereignty of the people, but as the reign of particularities. In 2021, Hungary passed a law banning the promotion of homosexuality among minors; in 2022, the European Parliament considered that Hungary was no longer a democracy, but "a hybrid regime of electoral authoritarianism." Yet, all decisions are made with the approval of a sovereign people. Democracy is now conceived as "the recognition and legitimization of all particularities." The term "electoral autocracy" implies that it is no longer elections that make democracy, but obedience to the dictates of particularities, even if they represent a tiny percentage of the population. In the XNUMXth century, a democracy was recognized by the fact that it did not impose a doxa; today, by the fact that it obeys a doxa. It was a debate around the contours of the common good; today, we are automatically excluded from it when we dare to submit militant particularities to the debate.
SYSTEMS THINKING
For Christian anthropology, the evil of the world is attributable to individuals, endowed with free will. Christian societies did not oppose institutions, but demanded the reform of individuals. Conversely, modern thought begins to locate evil in institutions. Rousseau sees the origin of evil in private property: the culprit is not the first to eat the fruit, but the first to say: "this is mine" (Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes, 1755). "Rousseau creates the institutional devil": for the first time, evil is in the system. Current systemism reflects a fatigue of individual responsibility, because it is infinitely simpler to see evil outside oneself. Systemism deprives the person of his own conscience and responsibility.
Systems thinking reflects the desperate search for purity, based on the hope of finally identifying evil and ridding the world of it. For the woke, racism would be eliminated if there were no more white people—for the Nazis, if there were no more Jews; nor bourgeoisie for the Soviets. Hannah Arendt was met with an outcry when she theorized the "banality of evil," meaning only that Nazism does not absorb all the world's evil and exonerate other humans. She had the unforgivable audacity to assert that there have been other genocides in history. Although Nazism represented a paroxysmal form of it, evil is everywhere, and it is naive to think that it will be eliminated by abolishing certain institutions.
Manichaeism is always easier: good and evil are clearly divided. From this point of view, wokeism is a form of Catharism: "after the Cathars, the communists and the woke have their chosen and their damned" (p. 39).
RADICAL NOMINALISM
Wokeism has an advantage over Marxism: the class struggle demanded a concrete result, but the results of Wokeism depend only on a performative will; "they are verbal enchantments imposed by intimidation and violence" (p. 43). The woke have their own world, which evolves according to their desire. Reality becomes performative, created by language.
The postmodern individual is a self-centered entrepreneur. This narcissistic individualism is infantile: as we become adults, we decenter ourselves, take into account our finiteness, and know we are dependent on a community. The individual has abandoned reality and wants everything to be possible. He has sunk into "radical nominalism" (JF Braunstein), where each word designates only itself, stifling reality. William of Occam's nominalism consisted of saying that concepts or universals have no real existence, because only individuals exist. Today, this nominalism ousts any idea of the universal: each individual is their own species. Categories are jeopardized; we are accused of amalgamation as soon as we assign a quality to a given group, or even of conceptualizing: every concept is suspected of being an instrument of domination. Hence the ideal of universal fluidity where boundaries are abolished—especially between the sexes.
According to Arendt, Westerners deprived of transcendence did not fall back into the common world, but into themselves. The abandonment of transcendence took place in several stages: in the 19th centurye century, religions were replaced by social utopias, secular religions; after 1945, disappointed by these secular religions, the Westerner turned to the self, which became the locus of all demands. The hope for a perfect society became that of an identity perfectly in line with my desires. Like children, the postmodern individual seeks to forget the difficulty of accepting reality, to pretend to free himself from all determination – indeed, all determination is negation, because definition excludes that which is not it. On the contrary, freedom, according to postmodernists, is the possibility for life to express only itself.
DECLINE OF REASON
The chapter on reason is particularly interesting: the challenge is to understand how the renunciation of the universal and democratic values leads to the decline of rationality. The Greeks were the first to formulate the idea of a universal reason, to which even God is subject. For Islam, on the contrary, an arbitrary God establishes the laws of the world and man must obey. In the West, the questioning of universal truth begins by questioning the adequacy between reason and God. In the 20th centurye century, the rejection of reason came about in reaction to the unlimited powers conferred on it by the Enlightenment.
The process of modern "deshellenization" began with Leon Shestov (1866-1938), who questioned Greek rationality, going so far as to write: "Two and two make four, it's death" – which foreshadowed the famous "Two and two make four stinks of white patriarchy." Distrust of reason emerged in Russia, as Russian genius preferred exception to system and prayer or magic to demonstration. Reason is useless because it prevents us from taking the only interesting look at the world: a spiritual look. Influenced by Kierkegaard's existentialism, Shestov asserted that, from an existential point of view, the Earth is indeed at the center of the world. Chantal Delsol highlights the influence of this "thinking from the outside" on authors of the last century, from Cioran to Ionesco, from Camus to Blanchot, and from Foucault to Deleuze. The latter draws on Shestov in Difference et repetition (1968), a hymn to particularity and specificity. For the thought of Deconstruction, "knowledge is domination, knowledge a lure with the aim of enslavement." "Truth as a stable and universal essence is replaced by truth as a singular and fluid event."
The idea of truth has a history. It appeared around the 6th century BC, concurrently in the Old Testament and in Greece: Parmenides and Abraham are the fathers of this idea. The God of Abraham truly exists, no longer presented as a myth among others, but as a reality. Westerners, the sons of Parmenides and Abraham, founded a universal and exclusive belief, valid for all – while the myth is valid only for a particular society.
The spread of ideologies and totalitarianism is part of this regime of truth, which was supposed to constitute a guarantee against autocracies. However, truth has become tyrannical: religious truth, then ideological truth, and today technocratic truth. The notion of truth has been lost through its own excesses. The ideologies of the 20th centurye century have done great harm to the regime of truth, partly explaining the eclipse it is experiencing in the 21st century.eNazism and Stalinism are defined by the certainty of the “truth”, using a performative word of truth: I do not describe what happens, but what I say happens – mutatis mutandis, performativity claimed by the gender studies. Until reality catches up with the truth-makers. "Dogmatization finally caused the loss of the truth regime, shattered by its own caricatures." "Truth is sought and cannot be held" (p. 147). Moreover, the error consisted in finding these obvious truths elsewhere than in science: religious faith and then ideology identified with mathematical evidence. The obsession with religious and then ideological dogmatization leaves nothingness behind. Postmodernism rejects reason, practices "misology" (Plato, Phaedo). Now science, born in the West because it is the daughter of the idea of truth, is also the most direct expression of the regime of truth, because what it grasps is the most manifest.
The criteria of science are non-obedience to the truths of power, submission to reality, the search for unanimity, the privilege given to experience. At every age, religious or political authorities have sought to hinder science. Galileo had to feign to save his life; the Church invoked the "equivalence of hypotheses" (between science and theology) to avoid bowing to science. Then it was Lysenko: the Party invoked relativism, the equivalence between bourgeois science and proletarian science. But science does not tolerate any adjective – mutatis mutandis : there is no more decolonial or indigenous science than bourgeois science. Freed from religion and ideology, postmodern societies do not, however, honor science without prejudice. As Marcel Kuntz shows, the scientific approach is invested by militant groups, such as those who vandalize research on GMOs to prevent it from being successful. A journal has even been created, AFIS [French Association for Scientific Information]. Sciences and pseudo-sciences, to document these militant lies.
Delsol sketches convincing parallels between the pre-scientific era before Kepler and Galileo and the post-scientific age of social science studies. In the pre-scientific mentality, the good and the useful come before the true (Bachelard). This mentality values, while science mocks value, seeks the true and not the useful. The entire scientific approach is based on the belief in the truth, which must be discovered – according to the etymology of the word alethiaThe scholar is humble, there only to bring to light what is beyond his power. Conversely, militant science constructs its object and places it at the service of good. As in the Middle Ages, astrology and astronomy are no longer distinguished – and, one might add, magic and spiritualism become academic disciplines.
Truth has a fatal flaw in the eyes of contemporaries: it is not inclusive. It is even exclusive since it rejects the untrue. It produces distinctions: man/woman or human/animal, fact/construction, reality/fiction, opinion/knowledge. However, the postmodern spirit detests divisions, abolishes dualisms and rejects hierarchies. "The quest for truth is aristocratic by definition, since it demands explicit qualities and since its results are divisive." (p. 169) It is a question of destroying any overhang: truth is fascist, becomes a heteronomous affirmation. As Marcuse stated in 1968, science and philosophy depend on the slave society in which they appeared – ancient Greece.
Both totalitarianisms were imposed supposedly in the name of science; yet among postmodernists, it is science that is totalitarian. As in 1968, we ask "who is speaking?" in the face of scientific discourse. As soon as the question is asked, the universal is lost. Science is "contextualized," its assertions come from a context: yesterday it was Jewish, proletarian science... and today it is male, white, Western, or decolonial, inclusive science. Objectivity does not exist; what exists are diverse discourses, coming from diverse groups with diverse histories and values. There are no longer universal truths, but only cultural truths, therefore partial, plural. In Quebec, indigenous knowledge demands to be placed on the same level as others. However, "if science is judged according to criteria other than competence, it literally no longer has any reason to exist." Multiplying the sources of 'truth' for reasons of tolerance is a moral measure that destroys science" (p. 174). Certainly, the triumphant rationality of the Enlightenment tended to oust any form of knowledge based on intuition, fueling the opposite excess, and it is not illegitimate to ask what place to give to extra-rational knowledge. But the science studies put all knowledge on the same level, and call for "decolonizing science" to rehabilitate the losers of history, to devalue the Western discourse of science to make room for other discourses, such as traditional medicines. Scientific objectivity is denounced as an ideology for power. It is a question of compensating for historical inferiority by a denial of truth, in the greatest confusion of orders, where Good replaces Truth.
The exponential growth of the principle of equality has produced staggering effects: everyone is an expert, knowledge is no longer the preserve of scholars who possess experience and learning, but is everywhere, which produces a fragmentation of science. Social networks and the internet accentuate the phenomenon of the all-knowing individual. Paradoxically, only those who know are aware of their own ignorance! By a dangerous conceptual shift, we infer from the democratic equality of opinions the equality of all discourses in matters of science.
In moving from modernity to postmodernity, we have gone from absolute trust to distrust in science, two equally excessive positions: science does not answer why, does not say if God exists. The whole thought of Deconstruction reflects a disillusionment with science, from Zero degree of writing French Words and thingsMeaning is shattered, the link between words and things is broken. Lévi-Strauss's assertion that science and magic are two forms of knowledge contributes to relativizing and devaluing science.
We are experiencing the end of the theological presupposition, the end of a two-millennium cycle in which the world was created and ordered by a rational God and then by Reason. Indeed, faith in the possibility of science derives from medieval theology. For Whitehead, at the origin of science are two presuppositions: belief in the rationality of the world, which excludes chaos, and faith in a Creator. “We thought the world was intelligible because we thought it was created.” (p. 186). Science, as a specific mode of thought, receives a refutation once the theological presupposition is extinguished. The universal was constituted by religious dogmas, then by Nature. The ontological unity of the world began to disintegrate with modernity; and today, our “ontological agnosticism” assumes that reality is constituted by our beliefs.
From then on, the scientific spirit was no longer considered a stage in the march of universal progress, but a moment correlated with specific cultural demands. As Thomas Kuhn shows, the entire mass of scientific knowledge was produced by Europe over the last four centuries, thanks to one fundamental condition: the certainty that truth has value.
The scientific mentality consisted of loving the reality of this world. But reality is no longer loved; it must now be defended with as much force as religious beliefs once were. "Particular fictions have taken the place of science, imposing themselves not by universal reason but by intimidation and threat." (p. 186)world love (Arendt) has been replaced by self-loathing, the driving force behind decolonial and transhumanist theories, and by the "heuristic of fear" in ecological matters: provided we fear for nature and not for culture, fear is no longer a sad passion but a glorious one. We are witnessing a disaffection for the spirit, where hatred of the cultural world goes hand in hand with the worship of nature. The fear of climate catastrophe has become a religion, with its priests and dogmas.
Chantal Delsol eloquently evokes the three glaciations that Jacques Julliard spoke of: Stalinist, Maoist, and Wokeist. She concludes with a beautiful phrase: "At the height of these periods, our universities become madrasas, that is, theological schools, the exact opposite of what we call universities" (p. 193). The die is cast!
