Everything Is Political and No One Can Do Anything About It
The “post-politics” era of the 1990s and 2000s is over — people are engaged with politics everywhere you look. But strangely, our ability to do anything about those politics is still missing.
“Hyper-politics” is distinct in its specific focus on interpersonal and personal mores and its incapacity to think through collective dimensions to struggle.(Jorgen Haland / Unsplash)
Halfway through her autobiography The Years, French novelist Annie Ernaux gives her readers a political panorama of the mid-1990s:
The rumour was going around that politics was dead. The advent of a “new world order” was declared. The End of History was nigh . . . The word “struggle” was discredited as a throwback to Marxism, become an object of ridicule. As for “defending rights,” the first that came to mind were those of the consumer.
First published in 2008, Ernaux’s book appeared shortly before Lehmann Brothers went bust. An English translation only came about in 2017, already at the close of the “populist” decade. When it first was published, Ernaux’s work diagnosed a world in which people had retreated into privacy; where politics was relegated to the back burner while technocrats were in charge.
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