Individualism and the Rise of

Egosystems. The Extinction Society

Matteo Pietropaoli
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Individualism and the Rise
of Egosystems
The Extinction Society

Matteo Pietropaoli
Individualism and the Rise of Egosystems
 Matteo Pietropaoli

Individualism and
the Rise of
Egosystems
The Extinction Society
Matteo Pietropaoli
Link Campus University
Rome, Italy

ISBN 978-3-031-25280-8    ISBN 978-3-031-25281-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25281-5

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 Contents

1 I ntroduction  1

2 Economy
 of Consumption: Starting with Lipovetsky and
Bauman 25

3 Politics of Subjectivity: Starting with Lasch and Beck 57

4 Psyche of Autoimmunity: Starting with Ehrenberg and Han 85

5 Mythical
 Individual and Surrogate Individual: The End
of Civilization as a Desire109

B
 ibliography129

I ndex135

v
 1
Introduction

Abstract This introductory chapter offers a general vision of society and

the current individual, starting from his liberation process up to the
threat of extinction. Various philosophical, sociological and political
aspects are briefly addressed, useful to outline the framework in which to
insert the more in-depth and detailed reflection of the book. In particu-
lar, the themes of freedom and individual, of social evolution, of the new
widespread form of truth and politics are addressed here. Finally, the
introduction deals with the issue of a possible end of the world ethics, at
a time when the strongly individualistic inspiration collides with collec-
tive threats, which question the common survival even before individ-
ual rights.

Keywords Liberation • Extinction • Egosystem • Society • Individual •

Truth • Ethics

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 1

M. Pietropaoli, Individualism and the Rise of Egosystems,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25281-5_1
2 M. Pietropaoli

1 Liberation
Today’s global civilization, represented above all by the most advanced
societies in terms of organization and production, social and civil rights,
knowledge and technologies, has arrived in the second millennium after
Christ and in the fifth from the Pyramids in the proximity of its highest
conquest: the liberation of the human being from himself, that is, the
extinction.
Although this may seem like a boutade or a divertissement, or other
French words that evoke the joke in a cultured way, what is presented
here does not want to make fun of anyone. Rather, we want to point out
how the maximum process of liberation of the single man or woman (and
this distinction already says a lot) will lead in the near future to the extinc-
tion of the species, or at least, in the first place, of the human society to
which we have become accustomed since a few hundred years. And this,
according to the author, is not a drama but a process, at the same time
inevitable, regarding the maturation of autonomy and individual devel-
opment at levels never equalled before.
The goal of “liberation” of the human being, which goes hand in hand
with the process of individualization, seems in fact the point of arrival of
those great societies originating from the process of civilization, includ-
ing ancient ones, once it emerged from tribalism (Mesopotamia, Yangtze
River, Meso and South America, North Africa, etc.). Although primor-
dial or contemporary tribes are also in a certain way societies, and as we
will see indeed they have always been characterized by a very deep cul-
tural theme, intertwined as it is with the natural theme that moderns
instead distinguish (Descola, 2005), here we are not referring to this
when we speak of “the extinction society”. Perhaps the human species
will survive, perhaps through a neo-tribalism or in a renewed wild and
mythical stage, but it will be necessary to see what ecosystem will be
left for it.
The entire process of human development starting from the birth of
civilization, and therefore at the same time of an organized society,
appears today as a progressive path of liberation. This path has had an
infinite number of stages (back-and-forth steps, jumps and falls) and
peculiar characterizations while maintaining some basic features,
 1 Introduction 3

especially in the West. Just to mention the main ones: liberation from
need, liberation from loneliness, liberation from suffering and liberation
from constraints. In all these main traits, not unique and at times contra-
dictory, some fundamental historical trajectories can be identified: libera-
tion from nature and liberation from God (or from the gods), but also
liberation from other human beings (slavery, social codes) and liberation
from mental neuroses. Lastly, the current liberation of the human being
from himself, primarily in terms of shared humanity. A tension that leads,
through the progressive rise of egosystems, to self-destruction, as the indi-
vidual’s attempt to free himself from his own shadow. The more freedom
it matures, the more this species commits suicide.
Summarizing here an endless discourse in a narrow way, the human
being, in the trajectory of liberation from natural constraints (and thus
from need, from suffering, from loneliness), develops the social aspect
and societies themselves, from which, in turn, though as an individual he
tries for centuries to free himself (liberation from constraints, again from
suffering) to the point of reaching the latest individualism. Similarly, this
happens in the cultural trajectory of liberation from God (and from the
gods), which in fact is a liberation from a “real world”, of an absolute
truth, in favour of a common and verifiable “empirical world”, up to an
“individual world”, consisting of a perspective truth (Nietzsche, 1969
[1888]). A philosophical liberation first from God for the World (secular-
ization), then from the World for the Soul (psychologization) and finally
from the Soul itself, as a shared “human” soul, from which the individual
frees himself for his own singularity (individualization).
This liberation, both physical and psychic, is the difficult transition
from heteronomy to autonomy that every great philosophy (both Western
and Eastern) has wished for the human being. Yet, as for Philipp
Mainländer (1999 [1876]), the death of God is the creation of the world
so that the development of the latter is nothing but the continuous decom-
position of the former, the process of abandoning heteronomy turns out
to be an inclined plane where the required autonomy is always greater. The
human being who progresses all the more in terms of organization and
production, civil and social rights, knowledge and technologies, is build-
ing his own liberation by removing the foundations of concrete survival,
at least as current society if not as millenary civilization. Its human and
4 M. Pietropaoli

cultural development, in terms of autonomy of the individuals, is so

advanced that it negatively relates to the global problems which today’s
societies are facing and increasing in their development, primarily the
shattering issues of environmental nature, but also health and socio-eco-
nomic issues related to them (Richardson et al., 2011; Welzer, 2012).
This society, in the broad sense of few generations, will be the extinc-
tion society. And not because there has been insufficient development in
order to prevent it, in terms of the possibility of contrasting environmen-
tal disaster and depletion of resources, but because development has been
so advanced, in terms of civilization and culture of the person, to sup-
plant needs of the species for those of the individual. The human being,
in his process of liberation from nature and God, ultimately reaches its
climax: freeing himself also from himself, freeing himself from the last
dictatorship that still dominates him. That is to say “death”, no longer
dying as individual but as species. The end, as the end of the world, is not
a single conclusion, in which the individual finds himself lacking with
respect to something that continues, rather the end of his possibilities of
ending. Individual death redeemed by the end of the world.
The narcissism underlying these considerations is obviously significant,
in fact one of the adjectives which must be attributed to current society
(and to the individual) is that of “narcissistic”. What are the others? They
will outline the entire course of this book, in accordance with the primary
themes set out in the central chapters, which represent the main egosystems
of reference: consumption (economy), subjectivity (politics), autoimmu-
nity (psyche). However, we must not think that these are purely negative
characteristics; we rather reiterate that together with them, and thanks to
them, the most significant liberation of the human being in the history of
civilization is achieved. If after that a neo-tribalism returns, a new mythical
individual, or nothing, it will still have been worth it.

2 Individual
In his research on the cultural evolution of advanced societies, Ronald
Inglehart (1990, 2018) notes a fundamental passage that occurs between
the generations belonging to the era of the world wars and those of the
 1 Introduction 5

second post-war period. It is a change in values and ideas linked to the

constant increase in the chances of survival and existential security.
Liberation from material necessities (and a certain increase in general
“happiness”) characterizes for Inglehart the distinction between material-
istic generations (pre-war) and post-materialistic generations (after-war).
The change in values and beliefs from one to another is attributable in
particular to three directions: from collectivism to individualism, from
survival to self-expression, from embeddedness to autonomy.
These guidelines well represent the most current path of liberation,
which is relative to the twentieth century, that at the same time concerns
the extinction society addressed here. Inglehart, however, points out the
possibility of a regression with respect to these orientations and the
changes in beliefs connected to them (internationalism, multiculturalism
etc.) if security and survival are even just perceived as threatened (thus the
return to nationalism and right-wing sovereignism, or the ethnocentric
movements). In fact, Inglehart considers the tendencies of cultural open-
ness on the trajectory of a general “individualization” as an increase in the
happiness of individuals, and thus a regress of openness would represent
less happiness and greater friction for autonomy, but this is a consider-
ation which we will have the opportunity to discuss. Instead, it remains
important here not only to find the most current trajectory of change,
but also to ask ourselves what actually is this individual (and individual-
ism) towards which the three directions are proceeding, in terms of self-­
expression and autonomy as well. In order to better understand what
appears to be a process of liberation, in fact, first of all, we must under-
stand “from what” we are moving away. That is, for Inglehart, survival,
collectivism, embeddedness, as liberation at the same time from need
(nature), from others (society) and from tradition (history), in a peculiar
way. On the other hand, what remains when a person is disconnected
from natural, social and historical necessities (and classifications)? One
could say: the “absolute” individual, disconnected from everything.
However, a theoretically less complicated statement is better, namely the
individual “of a new era”, which is then defined as hypermodern or post-
modern. Not the ancient individual, constantly bound to the past, the
tradition and the myth, nor the properly modern one, always projected
towards the future, the progress and the civilization of himself and others,
6 M. Pietropaoli

but rather the one in some ways “reflective” and in others “surrogate”:
frantically existing in the mere present and in the particularity (even vir-
tually global), in the continuous search for a self that at most he finds
temporarily, never firmly placed and acting in a world endowed with
meaning.
The term individual in the Greco-Roman classicism has its correspon-
dence with the “atom”; in fact it is the indivisible and completely distin-
guishable of the existing. Philosophically: what of someone is completely
different from other entities, with which he also shares the essential char-
acteristics. All human beings share “humanity”, but each one is his own
individual existence. This makes him an individual: uniqueness in gener-
ality. This uniqueness, furthermore, according to the lesson of Martin
Heidegger (and in general of Western metaphysics), is not just the
uniqueness of an “ego” (psychic or corporeal) disconnected from other
entities, but rather always an extended horizon, an ex-sistentia, a being
outside that is already world (Heidegger, 1927). The individual at the
bottom like the Leibniz’s mundus concentratus proper to the “monad”: an
ego-world.
Precisely, the egosystemic absoluteness of the hypermodern or post-
modern individual, in his attempt to satisfy himself as a world, establishes
his fundamental difference from previous “natural”, “social” and “histori-
cal” individuals. This aspect has at the same time traits of infantilism, in
the sense that the attempt to free oneself from any external and universal
reference, in order to immerse in the present and in the particular of
emotions, recalls a character of childhood. It is no coincidence that what
dominates is the search for pleasure against the resistances (and suffer-
ings) of reality, according to the Freudian distinction between the plea-
sure principle and the reality principle that marks the growth of the
individual, where the former (at least at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury) had to yield more and more to the latter. The constitution of an
ordered psyche in Ego, Id and Superego, self-directed and responsible,
required precisely this confrontation and clash in the name of civiliza-
tion, as well as the final surrender with respect to reality.
Yet this freeing from constraints and necessities, which is at the same
time a search for lightness with respect to the responsibilities of being an
absolute individual, is precisely that child’s play which accompanies
 1 Introduction 7

maximum liberation. The “child” evoked by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra

(2006 [1885]), who is the lord of his own existence, can afford infantil-
ism and great happiness because in the game he lives up to his rules and
reflects the great style of over-human autonomy: giving himself his own
weight. Only individuals who feel completely responsible for their world,
as Lipovetsky (2006) recalls, can genuinely be childlike. They do not feel
judged or dependent on either nature, society or history. The search for
lightness, typical of the return to childhood (which the new consumer-
ism itself favours), is the essential counterpart of the burden of an enor-
mous responsibility, due to maximum liberation. As Ehrenberg
remembers: the weariness of being oneself, only and absolutely oneself
(Ehrenberg, 1998).
This mutation and tension of today’s individual finds its roots in a
secular, if not millenary, philosophical result which finds its primary but
not unique exponents in Nietzsche and Heidegger. The “death of God”
and the end of absolute truth advocated by Nietzsche lead the human
being to conceive himself (and act) as that “project” which for Heidegger
is the being-there (Heidegger, 1927). With this new definition of the
human, Heidegger places a central focus on temporality, both for the
individual and for his existential horizon, namely the world. There is a
primacy of time, of becoming, as opposed to what is stability, the being
understood as something permanent, and the human being in this sense
is included by Heidegger within a definition of “existence” and no more
of “essence”. That is to say, the individual is something which is consti-
tuted in fieri, in freedom and in his life. Not something already given but
something that makes itself and makes its world existing: “the essence of
being-there lies in its existence” (Heidegger, 1927, p. 60).

3 Society
These philosophical conceptions, in themselves elitist and linked to an
intimate path of reflection, reach the public dimension after some time,
in comparison with a mass society that has developed and is changing
from the economic, technological and relational point of view, to the
point of transforming itself in that one conceived by Zygmunt Bauman
8 M. Pietropaoli

(1997, 2000) as a postmodern society of a “liquid” character. This liquid

society (and life and postmodernity itself ) is largely determined by the
collapse of social, work and ideological certainties, typical of the late
twentieth century. According to Bauman, this involves two different
responses for the individual, which have repercussions on the political
level, both passive and active, of his behaviour, especially in a democracy.
On the one hand, there is a strong individualism, a demand for freedom;
on the other hand, this desire for freedom is joined by great uncertainty
and great fear. “There is the belief that change is the only permanence,
and uncertainty the only certainty” (Bauman, 2000, p. 8). This fluid soci-
ety, this individual who is at once free, hyper-individualistic and very
insecure, reserves his attention mainly to consumption. For Bauman,
postmodern society is made up of individuals who behave like mere con-
sumers, with a frantic need to satisfy their instincts. Consumers not only
of goods, but also of sensations, ideas, people, feelings.
The tension that existed in the previous era, in modernity, to the stable
possession of something, now becomes a frantic need for consumption, a
society of beginnings and discards, because the individual according to
Bauman becomes aware of becoming, of the non-fixity of things. Faced
with the disorientation he feels in not having clear references, he begins
to focus on this tension to stimuli, which Bauman calls “consumerist
syndrome”, that is the impossibility of postponing the satisfaction of the
need, a constant consumption aimed at satisfying these tensions. And at
the same time, such an individual sees his freedom as the only possibility
of satisfying these needs and therefore is very jealous of it. Any common
or stable project risks taking away this freedom from him.
A society, therefore, that leads very isolated subjects to hyper-­
individualism, also due to hyper-stimulation. Psychologist Alexander
Lowen (1983) considered this hyper-stimulation to be a characteristic of
modern life, which defined both social relations and communication. In
this regard, Lowen stated that this set of varied and pressing stimuli, as
hyper-stimulation, does not lead to being more active and absorbing
more, rather it leads to the anaesthetization of sensations. The psyche of
the individual, in order not to suffer excessive stress from these stimuli,
implements defensive anaesthetization processes and thus always needs
stronger stimuli to feel something. The same thing happens, mutatis
 1 Introduction 9

mutandis, for society in the broad sense and politics in the strict sense,
above all the democratic one.
A reflection that is found in various considerations by Christopher
Lasch (1979), who analyses, together with the consumerist and narcis-
sistic dynamics (Bauman and Lowen), also one linked to the spectacular-
ization of life due to media. That is television, and now also social
networks, in their mediatic character, which relaunch an “exceptional”
type of life. On the one hand, this model makes the normal individual
want to be exceptional, and therefore generates a hatred and contrast
towards the mass; on the other hand, however, it multiplies his difficulties
in a society of this type, full of projects and opportunities, to accept the
banality of existence, typical of ordinary and daily life, which certainly
does not bear an exceptional nature.
All this has repercussions for Lasch on an ever deeper detachment, in
society and in democratic politics, among the few who manage, due to
their social class and fortunes, to escape from normality and to effectively
guide the processes of their lives, and those who get stuck in it. This ever
larger gap between elites and citizens, in democracies, leads to feel a real
betrayal of the original principles of noblesse oblige that social distinction
claimed and required. And this has for decades started a “cultural war”,
currently exploded in its contradictions, which seems to tear the political
communities and the civic sense, first of all in the West.
With regard to the political framework of this society, the philosopher
Byung-Chul Han defines it as a neoliberal regime dominated by “psycho-
politics” (Han, 2014), characterizing it in differentiation from what was
the modern disciplinary society governed by “biopolitics” (Foucault,
1975). In short, he affirms that there was previously a society structured
around a political power which tried to control the bodies, conforming
them, training them and imposing a certain individual model useful for
certain social and economic systems (example of indoctrination struc-
tures such as factories, barracks, asylums and schools themselves). While
disciplinary society worked orthopedically on bodies, for Han psychopo-
litical power works on minds, trying to establish not so much mecha-
nisms of duty as mechanisms of possibility. It actually works on the
freedom of individual, to optimize himself, to be the best project of him-
self and therefore, at the same time, determined as he is within the
10 M. Pietropaoli

capitalist market system, to exploit himself for work and consumer pur-
poses according to the dominant societal dynamics.
This concept implies that this neoliberal regime manifests itself through
an “excess of positivity”, as will be seen better, compared to a society that
instead disciplined everything, through the negativity of training. The
problem with this passage for Han is that in the excess of positivity, any
possibility of resistance is lacking. Any attempt to oppose, culturally and
socially depleted, in fact fails to conform revolutionary subjects or at least
conscious citizens, but only creates a generic “dissent”, in which the soli-
tary struggle of those who rebel, unable to constitute a collective “us”,
ends up turning against themselves, generating depressed subjects.
Indeed, the social theme of individualism and the “pathologies of free-
dom”, including primarily depression but also burnout, attention disor-
der and addiction, dominates the reflection of Alain Ehrenberg (1998).
He tries to show the passage from a modernity shaped by conflict, and by
the social, existential and psychological dynamics linked to it (above all
the Freudian neuroses), to one shaped by freedom, in the sense of both
psychic liberation and individual initiative and responsibility. Ehrenberg
in turn will recall Nietzsche (1973 [1887]) in an attempt to characterize
today’s individual as a democratized sovereign individual, with all the mod-
ulations, dynamics and pathologies that concern him and that affect cur-
rent society and politics. If in fact democracy, as Isaiah Berlin (1959) said,
requires a continuous balance between “equality” and “freedom”, which
relate to each other in an inversely proportional way, what happens when
the very concept of individual freedom is radicalized and the scales start
to tilt heavily to one side?
While in fact several contemporary philosophers and sociologists focus
on the negative effects of this evident “individualization” for the socio-­
political dynamics of democracy (Sennett, 1977; Lasch, 1995; Han,
2013) or for the future of the world also in terms of survival to global
risks (Beck, 1999; Benasayag & Schmit, 2003), just as many authors try
to grasp the peculiarities of a new “society of individuals” which involves
a change of perspective that is sometimes positive (Giddens, 1990;
Lipovetsky, 2006; Millefiorini, 2015). Indeed, by reading the phenom-
ena of autonomy and individual freedom as gains, by facing the patholo-
gies and deviances of the new dynamics, an entire horizon is opened to
 1 Introduction 11

wonder if a new conception of democratic citizenship and social life is

possible, starting from the autonomous individual and a responsible
“politics of subjectivity”, which, with a renewed structuring of the socio-­
economic system (Fioramonti, 2017; Bardi & Pereira, 2022), would not
be at the expense of the common good and rights, but would rather
strengthen them in favour of people (Inglehart, 2018). Or if the path of
individualization is really intended for an extinction of civilization as we
know it and even of species.

4 Truth
The concept of truth has been changing much more in the last century
than in the previous four millennia. Obviously, we mean the concept of
truth for human beings, their civilizations and their culture. Although in
human history, there have been exceptional individuals, out of the norm,
who reflected on truth and contradicted the dominant visions. These
thinkers, philosophers and mystics, however, have always been a rarity
(Ortega y Gasset, 1930). They lived mostly isolated or in any case under-
stood by few. For the great mass of humanity, before the past hundred
years, the truth was a clear, stable and univocal thing.
Whether it was a pantheon of gods, only one God or a cosmos ordered
according to universal laws, every mythology and cosmogony, even the
“positivistic” one of the nineteenth century, offered to the human beings
of a specific civilization a clear, stable and univocal understanding of
truth. And mind you, not only of the physical truth of a world, but also
of the moral truth of the same. That is, the truth both of world and of
human being. Without going into the Nietzschean issue concerning the
various passages of the so-called history of truth, from the true world
(otherworldly) to the empirical world (contingent) that has become in
turn true world, it is interesting here that more than a century ago
Nietzsche (1969 [1888]) defined the history of truth as “history of
an error”.
According to Nietzsche, in fact, the truth is an “error”, but that error
is necessary for the human being in order to live. An error useful for life,
instrumental to it, through which the living one does not abandon itself
12 M. Pietropaoli

to the insignificance of things. Truth therefore, as horizon of sense useful

to living, is always a perspective truth, linked to the point of view and the
need of the individual (which also means to the civilization and commu-
nity of reference). The truth in the human sense serves to make civiliza-
tion survive, it is a belief and a holding for true, it is not true in itself.
Although other thinkers have questioned in various forms and meth-
ods, as well as in different eras, the concept of absolute truth, it is with
Nietzsche and the twentieth century that this revelation begins to be
taken seriously, even from the general public. The death of God, namely
for Nietzsche the end of the absolute values, is at the same time the secu-
larization of the entire West, which passes through secular religions such
as nationalist and positivist ones, but arrives at the same result every-
where: widespread demythization (Topolski, 1977).
The Enlightenment had already started such a path, still dominated by
the mythization of reason (and morality) (Kant, 1929 [1788]) as an
almost otherworldly entity (another true world). Yet Romanticism had
brought that nostalgia for the unity that favoured the myths and ideal
narratives in contrast to the empirical truth. The first half of the twenti-
eth century lived the same process, as Horkheimer and Adorno in
Dialectic of Enlightenment remember (1947), when a demythizing aware-
ness which leads to positivism in the sciences, including social ones, and
liberal ideas in politics, is rejected in favour of the mythical narrative
horizon of mass ideologies and totalitarian dictatorships.
Precisely, the transition to the twentieth-century mass society entails a
short circuit in the relationship between the individuals and the truth
(Fromm, 1941). By ceasing that clarity, stability and interpretative
uniqueness of the world, now that even the majority of the population
participates in education and civil life, everywhere in the West move-
ments are born which aim at contrasting modernity (Ortega y Gasset,
1930). The great philosophical “systems” falter, while new worldviews are
affirmed with a fundamental element at their base (Nietzsche and the will
to power, Freud and the unconscious, Marx and the economic structure),
generating in turn strong ideologies, totalitarian and not, which seek to
replace the loss of absolute truth and the rampant relativism (often degen-
erated into nihilism) (Reich, 1933).
 1 Introduction 13

What seemed like an uninterrupted path of progress in the sense of

psychic, civic and moral liberation of the individual undergoes a setback
and turns into its opposite (Ehrenberg, 1998). From a pragmatic and
autonomous human being, citizen of a bourgeois society of civilization
and self-direction (Millefiorini, 2015), now he submits himself to totali-
tarian ideologies and derogates from his autonomy for an almost religious
heteronomy. Yet this transition, also pushed by the dominant economic
forces of capitalism, does not last long (Bell, 1960). Mass society itself,
following enormous conflicts and tragedies in the name of new ideals,
evolves into an abandonment of total narratives in favour of individual
perspectivism, conforming a society of individuals which is the postmod-
ern one (Bauman, Inglehart, Han etc.) or hypermodern one (Lipovetsky,
Giddens, Beck etc.). Here the human being of Western civilization is no
longer willing to “die for ideas”, or to kill for them, but above all he is not
willing to become that no one who joins the crowd in its common motions
(Le Bon, 2012 [1895]). The collapse of ideologies, the liberation from
social forms and codified rituals, the rampant consumerism and narcis-
sism, constitute a life in which the truth is so understood in a perspective
way as to be true only for the individual, without common resonance and
without objective confirmation (“dissonant” such as dissent) (Koensler &
Rossi, 2012). A confused, contingent and ambiguous truth. In short, the
so-called post-truth.
This post-truth is often misunderstood, even by the media, as nothing
more than fake news, namely as false, spontaneous or artfully created. It
is certainly known the phenomenon whereby false news is spread on the
media, mainly digital, for marketing or political communication inter-
ests, and these are shared more than the real ones because they are more
sensational (Chadwick, 2013). Thus the media logic, in the search for a
sensation, contributes to the growing “polarization” of points of view
(Klein, 2020). However, the phenomenon here goes deeper. Why do
people believe fake news often in a more participatory and active way than
in confirmed news, trusting less official sources more than the accredited
ones? And again, what does it mean to believe or not to believe this news?
In an information landscape often defined as infodemic, dominated in
turn by infotainment aimed at sensationalism, where mostly the large
mass of news is suffered without active research (articles on social
14 M. Pietropaoli

networks or others), it is clear that people struggle to believe in what they

receive or even just select this overload of information (Negroponte,
1995). On top of this, there is a loss of authority of the traditional inter-
mediate bodies, as reliable mediators, due not necessarily to their profes-
sionalism and credibility in themselves, but rather at a time of liberation
of individuals from the classic forms of mediation in favour of a direct
experience of the content (Bentivegna & Boccia Artieri, 2021). All this
implies that individuals do not have the time and ability to truly analyse
the information received; on the contrary, the overload often involves a
deficient syndrome in this aspect (see the Informative fatigue syndrome
[Lewis, 1996]), so as to provide automatic and non-reflexive responses
(distinction between reflexive and automatic system by Kahneman
[2011]), receiving and assimilating only what is already part of their cog-
nitive framework or their vision of the world.
Each piece of information is a strengthening of the individual’s perspec-
tive truth, since he will always find in the information landscape a “data”
to support it, whether it is true or fake it does not matter. This leads pre-
cisely to the extreme polarization of the points of view that we are witness-
ing in public opinion, given that there is no common sharing of data and
truth, but each one is confirmed in his idea more and more clearly (on the
model of the echo chambers of Cass Sunstein [2017]). The polarization in
the proper sense of the “two poles”, however, perhaps existed even more in
mass society, where great narratives and total ideologies characterized peo-
ple in everything (think at capitalism-socialism contrast that divided the
world in two for a whole “short century” [Hobsbawm, 1994]).
Yet there were, with respect to a perhaps indifferent silent majority,
deployments that saw the same common system under two different
interpretations, each one with its own fixed points, rituals and meanings
for the individuals who believed in it. Current polarization, instead,
manifests itself for the most part as a fragmentation of ideas and points of
view, which sometimes gather themselves in certain common clusters, but
are almost never found in a clear, stable, univocal worldview. From dual
systems, still based on conflict and contrast, to egosystems, based on free-
dom and detachment.
The collapse of ideologies, the hypermodern or the postmodern as cer-
tainly post-ideological, leads to a point-like whole of individuals,
 1 Introduction 15

personalities and worldviews, who manage to gather on some shared con-

ceptions and battles, but not as a community or a crowd, rather as a
swarm (Han, 2013). This swarm of isolated individuals gathers and dis-
perses; it does not constitute a stable and common “us”, but a temporary
group of “egos” with similar or converging personal goals and interests.
The clusters around which these swarming individuals gather themselves
from time to time allow each other to reinforce their own perspective
truths, creating resonance (and redundancy) with respect to “extreme
ideas”, which attract more because they provide an exceptional narrative.
Precisely this search for “exceptionality” characterizes the individual
selves of the swarm, who are dominated by the narcissistic syndrome
afferent to developed Western societies (Lasch, 1979). The constant pre-
sentation of exceptional media realities, as has been said, has made the
individuals of these societies at the same time attracted by this exception-
ality and repulsive towards what is “common”. Yet their lives are mostly
dominated by everyday life, without great noise or yearnings, especially
in this civilization of wellbeing. So their wills now apparently free from
social, natural and psychic constraints (Ehrenberg, 1998) pour their indi-
vidual initiative on the one hand on unbridled consumerism (uses and
discards of things, people, emotions) (Bauman, 2005; Lipovetsky, 2006),
but on the other on the narcissism of their own ego (Lasch, 1979; Lowen,
1983), basing only on these two aspects an unstable sense of the world
and a fragile self-representation.

5 Politics
Since the self-referentiality of today’s individual has nothing to do with a
common resonance, shared codes and a relationship to the other aimed at
the synchronic creation of something, the same polarization also in poli-
tics represents for the individual the attempt to assert himself in a highly
desired exceptionality. Within a social framework where no one really has
a role and meaning, as well as in the absence of a total narrative and com-
mon references, the individual tries to show himself as someone (Han,
2013). Unable to authentically relate to others but thrilled by the desire
to be recognized as exceptional (for the narcissist “the world is a mirror”
16 M. Pietropaoli

[Lasch, 1979, p. 10]), he finds himself in an impasse which leads him to

reject mediations and moderate positions for the extremization of ideas.
At the same time, the difficulty of obtaining recognition and the bore-
dom of everyday life polarize points of view, especially in a political com-
munication of digital nature (chat and social networks), where affirming
oneself with an identity is much more difficult and requires even more
clear-cut and extreme ideas.
Significant of the fact that this polarization is actually a fragmentation
is the lack of participation in traditional parties and the distance of com-
mon citizens from these parties and their unions. This entails, especially
in the younger ones, preferring ever new realities, which favour the spread
of populism (Kaltwasser et al., 2017), to the point of disappointment for
the promises of change betrayed, very easy and quick to occur, finally
leading to abstention (now rampant). Not only that. The same whole of
citizens no longer represents a clear and recognizable electorate, even for
politicians. And this not limitedly to the disappearance of social classes,
but also as large groups of citizens who can be associated by interests,
ideas and values (Inglehart, 2018). Everyone is his own party and finds
himself in certain battles, but not in others, of a certain more or less
structured political alignment, creating multidimensional and highly dif-
ferentiated perspectives, basically hyper-individualistic.
Even in the mere evaluation of one’s own “interests”, in relation to
public problems, various scholars have identified the problem of citizen’s
difficulty in recognizing them (Stone, 2002). Leaving aside the emotional
level of today’s politics, which is certainly not secondary especially in
populism (search for justice and revenge, as well as general narrative and
social identity), the appeal to evaluation of personal and pragmatic inter-
ests clashes in turn with an enormous fragmentation and incurs the phe-
nomena defined as “lack of awareness” (not realizing that we are touched
by a problem) or “false awareness” (believing that we are afflicted by a
problem which does not really concern us). Political communication
itself often works around these phenomena, exploiting both the emo-
tional aspect and the cognitive errors of a citizenry that turns out to be a
very little rational agent (both politically and economically [Thaler, 2016]).
Sometimes, however, this rejection of practical, personal or even
national interests (think of international causes against one’s own nation),
 1 Introduction 17

or the turning to more emotional than rational plans (ideal or even uto-
pian), is an attitude provoked by the exasperation of not counting demo-
cratically for anything. Not only for the individual, but for the entire
group of common citizens. Polarization (extremization), abstentionism
and populism can all be scornful responses to the feeling that, even in a
democracy, nothing can be changed in the proceeding of a society, also if
the elected representatives change.
Already in 1956, Robert Dahl coined the term polyarchy, that is, a
form of government in which the participation of citizens is limited to
the choice, more or less free, between competing elites in the manage-
ment of power (Dahl, 1956). These elites, continuing to manage power
alternately, have increasingly moved closer to one another and agreed on
various aspects, causing, together with the increase in bureaucracy (more
complex and capillary societies, which require numerous technicians)
and the domination of epistemic communities (sole holders of recog-
nized knowledge), the distance from common citizenry and the impover-
ishment of the power’s portion due to it.
The self-definition given by political communication is furthermore
what twists and aggravates the public problem. With the mass society
disappearing, with its modern party organization (mass parties with mil-
lions of members and great ideologies) and the centrality of politics itself
in favour of other power groups (primarily economic and financial ones),
the only thing left to politicians of the current era is communication. Or
rather, and this needs to be clarified, politicians are left with the same
power and need they have always had, namely the power to select the rul-
ing class and the need to obtain consent, but this logic of action no longer
meets the criteria of the modern era. The hypermodern or postmodern
politician does not seek to implement major reforms and social changes,
both because he does not have a clear idea of another society and real
solutions to global problems (as will be seen) and because the real powers
holding the mainly economic status quo are now non-political and trans-
versal (especially transnational). Between the expertise of bureaucrats, the
knowledge of epistemic communities and the control of money by cor-
porations, the politician elected even in democratic nations is a passing
individual, who in turn contributes to decide which elite group to sup-
port and how to obtain that consent useful for being re-elected.
18 M. Pietropaoli

The public policies implemented, therefore, tend to be small and tiring

concessions that the politician manages to snatch in the policy arena of
reference, in view of his personal consent, obviously in exchange for posi-
tions, roles and gains (clientele in general) for the network of personal
relationships of those who grant such concessions. This means that the
consensus obtained through public policies, especially those with wide-
spread benefits and therefore aimed at the majority of citizens (Wilson,
1989), is very burdensome and often “expensive” for the politician. Not
only in the sense of time and investments but also because he renounces
to personal and interpersonal gains in order to obtain the result (one
becomes “debtor” instead of “creditor” for the support of others). Added
to this cost and effort is the difficulty of making the voter understand
what has been done in his favour (indeed widespread and not concen-
trated benefit). This is due to aspects such as the errors of awareness seen
above, the poor understanding of the public and policy system by the
average citizen, and finally the amount of information, disinformation
and partial communication that spreads in the social landscape, which
makes the reception of what has actually been implemented difficult at
best, if not distorted (Mazzoleni, 2021).
Thus the current politician and the parties in a new form through the
narcissistic figure of leaders understand that the simplest and most effec-
tive way to obtain the “new” mass consensus, namely the consensus of
what is now a swarm (Han, 2013), and to place one’s own associates in
the circles that matter (primarily themselves), passes through communi-
cation. Political communication now largely supplants political action
and wide-ranging policies in identifying the interests, values and social
visions of the different alliances.
Not only of those in the opposition, mind you, but also of those who
are part of government in institutional, public and participatory situa-
tions. The impossibility of implementing real changes (e.g. see the
European constraints in the field of economy and the various limits to
state sovereignty) implies the need for politicians to tell something, that
is an apparent change, a proposal for change or a hope for change (for
those to whom this change obviously is of interest). Because fundamen-
tally the power over public affairs does not reside in their hands and when
it does, it is not worth wasting it in favour of widespread benefits,
 1 Introduction 19

considered not decisive and disadvantageous for the politician’s own

interests. A clear example of all this is the inability of the world’s ruling
classes to implement significant policies in response to climate change
and disastrous forecasts for the entire Earth’s ecosystem, despite constant
new meetings and great proclamations about this.

6 End of the World Ethics

The scenario thus described certainly does not bode well for the ability of
the human community to respond decisively and effectively to the global
threats that increasingly grip it. Risk has in fact become the figure of
international perspectives (Beck, 1986, 1999), from which certainly the
ordinary citizen, or rather the individual himself, is not spared even in his
own small way. Anxiety and anguish become aspects with which we live
every day in the extinction society, because the perception of insecurity is
growing and existential fragility is rampant. Not only for the apparently
closest threats, such as economic, health and military threats, also always
projected on a global level (2008 crisis, 2020 pandemic, 2022 war), but
above all for those insidiously considered “distant” and yet much more
catastrophic, such as the climate change, with its “tipping points” in
terms of impact on society and civilization (if not on the species)
(Richardson et al., 2011; Masson-Delmotte et al., 2021).
Although it may seem that this “risk” is not so perceived by the popula-
tion, it generates that level of constant arousal (especially in the new gen-
erations) which is added to the more contingent risks and difficulties. As
a degree of background alert and agitation, always present at a certain
amount, that does not allow the bar to go down completely and the indi-
vidual to really calm down. Each new crisis, be it social or individual,
begins therefore by grafting onto an already quite high level of collective
arousal, so that the reactions often become uncontrolled and lead to
extreme mental problems even in people without pathologies: from burn-
out and post-traumatic stress disorder to depression and suicide. Finally,
we could provocatively say, to a suicide of species, or at least of civilization,
when exasperation, mistrust and inaction lead to not opposing the most
20 M. Pietropaoli

worrying global threat for the human community: the climate disaster,
namely the end of human society as it has been understood for centuries.
The contradiction of this catastrophe lies precisely in the very high
level of development and wellbeing achieved by the individual in today’s
advanced societies. Even the person belonging to the so-called low classes,
in socio-economic terms, finds himself having more possibilities of con-
sumption, comfort and leisure than was available to an eighteenth-­
century nobleman. Today’s society has in fact increasingly levelled what
was prerogative only of the upper classes and has made it largely available
to everyone. The individual has such opportunities above all for con-
sumption (material, experiential, emotional) that seems to have reached
the so-called wellbeing society, at least in terms of goods and possibilities.
Yet at the same time, this consumer’s paradise, apparently capable of sat-
isfying every need and desire, does not immediately correspond to the
individual’s paradise, since happiness, as shown by the numerous psychic
pathologies and widespread disorders, really seems impossible to buy.
In this contradiction, between the apex of material wellbeing on the
one hand and the global threat of extinction on the other lies in part that
existential void which afflicts the individual in the final phase of his lib-
eration process. Liberation from oneself, namely the end of human civi-
lization (or of the species), involves at the same time freeing individual
from the last constraint that still oppresses him: to be happy. The convic-
tion to freedom, as Sartre (1946) recalled, becomes for the twentieth-­
century individual the only burden from which he seems unable to free
himself, the responsibility for what he does (and even more for what he
“is”). His absolutely autonomous testimony, no longer entrusted to an
eternal truth and a given essence of human (heteronomy), nor derived
from natural, social and historical necessities, throws him naked in his
existence, in his “being-there” (Heidegger, 1927). In this flow, which is a
becoming impoverished in meaning, the attribution of an order and a
morality fully falls on the individual, who must choose from Kierkegaard’s
lesson whether to live “without essence”, in an aesthetic way and in con-
tingency, or give himself one, in ethical terms (Kierkegaard, 2015).
To all this burden, as a result of the process of individual liberation
(secular, corporal, moral, social, psychic), the single person responds
mostly in a double way: either with the reference to lightness seen above
 1 Introduction 21

(play without responsibility) or with the individual search for meaning,

be it of a consumerist, a narcissistic, a hedonistic character. In any case,
he answers for himself, because his world is “perspective”, it is a mirror in
which he sees only what he represents. Thus, even at the end of the world,
the only one to save is himself and his extended proximity, his egosystem,
because the individual and the world are the same thing. Ethics becomes
more and more personal, incapable of a common “us” that is worth more
than an ego, because the ego has come to recognize its priority rights: the
pursuit of individual happiness, even before collective survival.
Which ethics, then, can prevail over this and ask to sacrifice the indi-
vidual in the name of the species? Mind you, to sacrifice not his life, but
his happiness and the possibilities of achieving it (therefore even just sig-
nificantly reducing consumption, on which it now depends in part). If
the horizon is individual and the temporality is only present, if there is
not an essence of the human beyond existing as one’s own project, what
immorality is there in not being interested in what happens beyond the
single life? On the other hand, however, we wonder, even before starting
the in-depth examination of economy, politics and psyche of this society:
in the face of the end of civilization (or of the species), what morality can
remain standing, with respect to rights of individuals? Faced with the
aesthetic pre-apocalyptic landscape of an extinction society, what ethics
can survive? And what kind of human being?

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 2
Economy of Consumption: Starting
with Lipovetsky and Bauman

Abstract This chapter is dedicated to the theme of the economy, or

rather to the theme of consumption, as the main social and individual
reference of the current economy. The leading authors of this phase are
Gilles Lipovetsky and Zygmunt Bauman, who in different ways have
placed consumption at the centre of their reflection. Both, in particular,
have compared this theme, with different declinations of “hyper-­
consumption” and “consumer syndrome”, to that of hedonism and nar-
cissism. In fact, today’s consumerism is mostly a spasmodic search for
happiness for oneself, with certainly also something else, such as a new
social symbolism, but keeping happiness in the role of fundamental
motive. Through three phases of the consumer society and seven meta-
phorical figures useful for defining the current individual, we will try to
grasp his new identity, both private and social, which is determined in
this process aimed at happiness.

Keywords Economy • Consumption • Happiness • Identity •

Hypermodernity • Lipovetsky • Bauman

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 25

M. Pietropaoli, Individualism and the Rise of Egosystems,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25281-5_2
26 M. Pietropaoli

1 Consumption of Happiness
This chapter is dedicated to the theme of economy, or rather to the theme
of consumption, as the main social and individual reference of the current
economy. The leading authors of this phase are Gilles Lipovetsky and
Zygmunt Bauman, who in different ways have placed consumption at
the centre of their reflection. Both in particular have compared this
theme, with different declinations of “hyper-consumption” and “con-
sumerist syndrome”, to that of hedonism and narcissism. In fact, what is
today’s consumerism if not a spasmodic individual search for happiness?
Certainly also something else, such as a new social symbolism (Baudrillard,
1970), but without this removing happiness from the role of fundamen-
tal motive.
The path of individual’s liberation, his individualization, is certainly a
eudemonic process. The will to freedom in itself is at one time a search
for happiness through the affirmation of himself in his own world, regard-
less of others and of reality. So that there is a lot of narcissism in this
individual’s liberation and in his pursuit of happiness. Yet this process of
liberation and self-affirmation is not really a progress in happiness, even
if it aims at happiness. How Lipovetsky will come to evaluate: “happiness
has no progress” (Lipovetsky, 2006, p. 286). Which means: there is no
trend change in the degree of happiness for the individual, nor an
advancement with respect to past eras, one is happy or is not. The Roman
peasant of 200 BC may be as happy on a sunny day as today’s multi-­
billionaire for his luxury entertainment, or not.
There is no progress in happiness and, even more, there is no possession
in happiness. One is happy and then it passes; it is not maintained as an
asset. For this reason, the current individual is above all a consumer, but
a consumer of happiness, or at least of experiences that tend towards hap-
piness. The consumption of goods, emotions, people, and thus all the
hedonism and narcissism that revolves around it is basically aimed at the
pursuit of happiness, which does not progress and is not possessed,
regardless of development and means. According to Lipovetsky, the “par-
adoxical happiness” of today’s society, very advanced in terms of means
and possibilities, attests to the whole drama of an existential duality, in
 2 Economy of Consumption: Starting with Lipovetsky… 27

which wellbeing and comfort are available to the majority, therefore for
the most part we live better than in the past, but we are constantly threat-
ened by “ill-being” and by happiness that eludes expectations.
The individual’s liberation does not necessarily correspond to the indi-
vidual’s happiness, quite the contrary. In freedom there is progress, and in
happiness there is not. There is no such thing as a movement in happi-
ness, nor such thing as an increase, whereas liberation is exactly a move-
ment and an increase in freedom. Even more, the only way to be free in
the proper sense, since also freedom is not a possession (rather the oppo-
site), is the constant process of liberation from the bonds formed each
time. Thus the attempt of freedom to achieve happiness reaches a point
where the former far exceeds the latter, exactly the situation that is under-
stood here as “extinction society”.
In fact, the set of practices of the individual’s self-affirmation, in hedo-
nistic and narcissistic terms, is currently aimed at happiness through the
instrument, or the syndrome, of consumption. What Lipovetsky (2006,
p. 111) defines as “consumption-world” is at the same time the set of
individual reference symbols for every aspect of existence and the same
way in which he understands all the external to himself, including objects,
people and the natural environment. Simply put, his egosystem of con-
sumption. What was defined as world-environment by a biologist like von
Uexküll (1934), that is, the whole of stimuli and reactions, is now ori-
ented on consumerism in eudemonic function, as consumption-world.
However, this implies, among other things, that the objects of consump-
tion (and the desire for consumption) include among their ranks the
subject, that is the individual himself, who evaluates, exalts and in fact
also consumes himself in the optics of an unstoppable pursuit of
happiness.
Given the endless possibilities of experience in today’s advanced societ-
ies, the individual no longer evaluates the issue of duration and stability as
primary, but tries to consume time as quickly and hedonistically as pos-
sible, fragmenting it and fragmenting himself. For Bauman, postmodern
eternity resides precisely in marking moments with consumerist activi-
ties, continuous beginnings and discards, which do not allow us to per-
ceive the limit of existence (Bauman, 2005). “In skating over thin ice our
safety is in our speed”, according to the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson
28 M. Pietropaoli

(2018, p. 35). In this way, however, the entire attention of the consumption-­
world is focused on the subject of consumption, not on the environment
of consumption, that is, on the environment-society that allows such
possibilities. The destruction of natural environment and the important
social lacerations, which will lead to the end of the enjoyment’s system,
are not perceived by today’s individual, who is totally focused on his
eudemonic research.
Since his happiness cannot be postponed, nor the consumerist and
narcissistic existence that he aims at slowed down, in the process of lib-
eration and affirmation of oneself as an individual the attention to the
environment-society is completely lost, hence the upcoming “extinc-
tion”. The same attempt to delegate the process of change and revolution
in current schemes to new generations, claiming the importance of edu-
cation and change of perspective, is another way for today’s individual to
protect his interests and his eternal life’s hope, in the sense of filling the
moments with experiences, pleasures and happiness as much as possible.
Without giving up and without slowing down, before the inevitable end.
The consumption-world is now assumed by individuals as “destiny”, inter-
nalized precisely in the spread of dissent and criticism, which do not
imply renunciation to the personal search for happiness, but find in turn
a niche of affirmation and consummation (even dissent is commercial-
ized). In fact, one protests against consumerism as one inveighs against
God, or against fate, only when one believes in its unshakable dominion.
But what is this domain and what was the path of this consumer society,
which freed the individual from natural, material, social (as well as moral
and psychic) constraints, yet receiving so much criticism and dissent?

2 One Syndrome and Three Phases

The differences in the reading of consumer society between Bauman and
Lipovetsky are numerous, the former being a staunch critic of this soci-
ety, to whom he provided the famous adjective “liquid”, whereas
Lipovetsky understands its many positive aspects at the same time,
counter-­balancing the catastrophic or, above all, unjustly nostalgic inter-
pretations of the past. What interests both of them here, however, is a
 2 Economy of Consumption: Starting with Lipovetsky… 29

common character in the reading, paradoxically of opposite meaning, or

better understood as such. It is not the issue of the transition from the
production society to that of consumption, the centrality of the
individual-­consumer, which certainly unites them and whose specific
development features will also be seen. Rather, the socio-cultural theme
extrapolated by both on the economic question is that of the expectation
that the consumer society generates in the individual and which falls pri-
marily on consumption itself. A very high expectation of affirmation,
achievement, happiness at the bottom, which, however, is mostly
betrayed, or which cannot simply be satisfied through the economic and
trade plan.
The “consumer syndrome”, which for Bauman grips the individual of
the liquid society as a consumer society, is in fact the inability to post-
pone the satisfaction of needs, desires, connected to the lack of existential
fullness that is felt once satisfied through the means that are proposed to
us, namely goods and consumption. Not only that. Given that this soci-
ety tends to a cultural vision whereby everything becomes “marketable”,
in fact the search for satisfaction of needs and desires through consump-
tion is also extended to areas that were once extraneous to this logic:
values, sensations, experiences, people.
The fact that this search for satisfaction turns out to be lacking every
time, so as to lead to new beginnings and discards, to ever faster uses and
waste, is intrinsically linked for Bauman to the mechanism of advanced
capitalism, based on the needs of the consumer, who always needs new
things to desire and aspire to. “Consumer society manages to render non-­
satisfaction permanent” (Bauman, 2005, p. 80)
By provoking this “sensitization” in the individual with respect to his
own needs and the expectation of satisfying once unimaginable desires,
the consumer syndrome proves to be fundamental for today’s economy of
deception, which according to Bauman rests on excess on the one hand
and waste on the other. In order for a new desire and a new expectation
of satisfaction to be there, what is old and lasting must fail. So the con-
sumer society moves all around the theme of strong sensations and rapid
discarding that generate more and more addiction in the individual. It
asks him to increase the rhythm in order to feel that little bit of satisfac-
tion and happiness useful to prevent him from sinking into depression,
30 M. Pietropaoli

due to the lack of meaning and stable references (social, political, existen-
tial, truthful). These are not individual issues for Bauman, but rather a
complex of culture and social stimuli which operates on the individual,
causing the great change that distinguishes the passage from a production
society to a consumer society: “the reversal of values attached respectively
to duration and transience” (Bauman, 2005, p. 83).
This basically prevents satisfaction and is therefore a malignant syn-
drome: the excessive expectation, never postponed but at the same time
never realized, always relaunched, of a socio-economic system which
indicates “consuming” as a source of happiness, with all the implications
and consequences (professional, relational, sentimental, community-­
related, psychic) of a frenetic existence based on continuous use and waste.
Also for Lipovetsky, whose peculiar reading of consumer society
through archetypal interpretations will be addressed shortly, excessive
expectation is the primary problem of individual ill-being widespread
even in highly advanced societies, characterized by a high level of material
wellbeing (Lipovetsky, 2006). However, this expectation is not betrayed
by goods and consumptions in themselves, nor by the economic system,
rather by the type of happiness to which an individual aspires: advanced
and stable, an ultimate happiness that cannot exist for the human being.
Thus the deception of this new passage in the development of civilization
is not caused by commercial economy, which boasts unimaginable satis-
factions, since what can be done in terms of material wellbeing, comfort,
health and safety seems to have reached levels never seen before. Rather,
deception is caused by the individual who thinks happiness must always
be available to him or can be purchased when needed.
Precisely because the technical-scientific development is so advanced,
and the liberation of the individual so progressed that it focuses almost
entirely on his happiness, people who are well cannot conceive dissatis-
faction, that is, they cannot tolerate that unhappiness persists and,
depending on the case, they take refuge in consumer goods or blame
these for their ill-being.
The development of a consumer capitalism with respect to a production
economy has certainly changed the type of society, culture and existence in
which people identify themselves: a “civilization of desire” very different
from the previous “civilization of duty” (or of “shame” and “guilt”).
 2 Economy of Consumption: Starting with Lipovetsky… 31

This passage, typical of liberal societies, was above all a process that
reflected (and favoured) the growing individualization in the economic
plan, making the consumer the main reference of the commercial system,
to the detriment of the individual producer (the craftsman or worker in
general) and the traditional intermediary (the shopkeeper). In the con-
sumer society, which evidently, where it has developed, has improved peo-
ple’s lives in terms of material wellbeing, both for the statistically verifiable
aspects and the less objective qualitative ones, there are social roles and
figures that win and others that lose, or just fade away. All this is mani-
fested mostly in the West since the end of the nineteenth century, with the
United States as a forerunner, and is determined in a series of steps that
Lipovetsky (2006) groups into three “phases”. Each of these phases has its
own characteristics, ultimately destined not to the exhaustion of consump-
tion or modernity, in terms of de-consumption and postmodernity, but to
their evolution as hyper-consumption and hypermodernity.
Although the term “consumer society” was used for the first time start-
ing from the development of the 1920s in the United States and became
popular only after the war, particularly between the 1950s and 1960s, the
consumerist evolution of civilization begins for Lipovetsky as early as mass
production and mass market of the late nineteenth century. In this phase,
which extends up to the Second World War, the scientific and technologi-
cal advancement, in terms of both machinery and factory work’s organiza-
tion, makes it possible to manufacture huge quantities of goods at much
lower prices than before. The scientific intuitions of Taylorism and the
technologically applied ones of Fordism, typical of production, are also
accompanied by advances in the transport and communication sectors
applied to commerce, that is the beginning of the still fundamental mar-
keting processes: branding, packaging and publicity. Aspects that not only
contributed concretely to the mass market’s possibilities, but also favoured
the consumption’s mentality in terms of educating citizens, as opposed to
the adverse cultural conceptions typical of the previous era.
In this phase, the traditional commercial chain almost disappears, of
craftsman or worker in general who produces something, mostly on
order, with very high costs and times, or supplies it raw to a shopkeeper
who packages it and sells it in retail, often through bargaining. Now a
company produces very large quantities of goods in a short time, which
32 M. Pietropaoli

means low costs, places a brand on it, makes large investments on adver-
tising as a guarantee of quality and recognition, eliminating the impor-
tance of the shopkeeper, and finally exposes the product in a “department
store” (facilities typical of this period) with a clear price tag, available to
the consumer. This process in itself opens the consumer market to a
greater number of people, although in this initial phase it is still limited
to the bourgeoisie, while the idea (or the syndrome) of consumerism
begins to spread among the population, thanks to advertising communi-
cation and new cathedrals of desire, such as the department stores. The
second phase identified by Lipovetsky is the one that most widely defines
the consumer society as a “mass consumer society” and takes place
between 1950s and 1980s. Here the civilization of duty is not only
replaced by the civilization of desire, but this desire is somehow realized,
since in material terms we start to see a substantial “abundance” and
improvement in quality of life appearing in Western societies, later
described as economic boom and even as a new “golden age” for the West
(Hobsbawm, 1994). In this phase, the democratization of purchasing
begins, allowing a much greater number of people to take advantage of
available technological products, from cars to TV sets, passing through a
whole range of household appliances (which contribute to the process of
women’s liberation). Thanks to further increase in production, the intro-
duction of welfare and the increase in wages, the spread of credit for
individual citizen (“instalments”), the purchase of goods (still durable
and standardized here) and consumption in general become really mass.
What was once a prerogative only of the upper classes, in terms of shop-
ping, comfort and leisure, now becomes something common among
people even in the lower and middle classes.
During this period, which has the characteristics of transition phases,
marketing extends itself to many areas of life previously unrelated to the
market, imposing the idea of growth, accumulation and constant socio-­
economic improvement in people’s minds (a characteristic of the so-­
called baby boomers generation). Furthermore, as a post-war era, the very
customs receive a liberalization which, having the United States always as
a forerunner, will profoundly transform personal and community objec-
tives, in the name of hedonism against sacrifice, fun against seriousness,
in short, towards those aspects of life that favour (and are favoured by)
consumerism.
 2 Economy of Consumption: Starting with Lipovetsky… 33

The very set of beliefs and values is heavily disrupted, as Inglehart

(2018) recalls, in a passage from materialism to post-materialism that
redefines as central to the individual no more collectivism, survival and
embeddedness, but individualism, self-expression and autonomy. Thus
the last cultural resistances disappear (think of Pier Paolo Pasolini in
Italy), and together with the new needs, frivolities and certainly possibili-
ties of wellbeing, also the relationship with “time” changes, in the passage
to primacy of becoming and present, that will make Bauman define this
society as liquid, but which had already been expressed by Heidegger in
Being and Time (1927). So the whole of these small and large revolutions
typical of this phase (in everyday life, politics, sex, family, work, etc.)
entail a further fundamental push to the individualization process, which
frees individuals from the severe constraints of nineteenth-century
modernity.
Although according to Lipovetsky this process does not lead entirely
beyond “modernity” as a broad epochal concept, he prefers in fact speak-
ing of hypermodernity rather than postmodernity, change that occurs here
shifts the attention from society to the individual as it never happened
before. While in fact consumer society at its inception, even in transition
from production to consumption, and therefore oriented to the primacy
of the consumer, maintained a “social” meaning of purchase and posses-
sion of goods, with the “third phase”, which comes immediately after the
mass market, even this shared meaning disappears. Since the 1980s, con-
sumption is increasingly associated with a search for personal wellbeing,
both material and emotional, in terms of an increasingly individual and
less and less codified affirmation of oneself. The social standing, which
had played a great part in the competition to purchase during previous
era, becomes now an aspect that is secondary to functionality, emotional-
ity and personalization of both goods and consumption.
The change in beliefs and values, which has lightened traditional social
impositions, has at the same time deconstructed their effectiveness and
ability to direct the mentality of the individual, including his needs and
desires. Although therefore the commercial process continues trying to
induce new consumptions, it mostly finds a more demanding consumer
who is aware of his own tastes, interested in choosing what to buy first-­
hand and less accustomed to accepting a standard offer or others’
34 M. Pietropaoli

judgement (passage from heterodirection to autonomy according to

Millefiorini [2015]). “Consumption ‘for oneself ’ has replaced consump-
tion ‘for the other’, in sync with the irresistible movement to personaliza-
tion of expectations, tastes and behaviours” (Lipovetsky, 2006, p. 20).
Not only that. In this phase, which Lipovetsky defines as hyper-con-
sumption, “for oneself ” means something that is above and beyond
(hyper) the materiality of consumption and even of person. The hyper-
consumer, like the goods, is de-materialized with respect to classical terms
of his social and corporal location. So that his consumption does not
enter into comparison or conflict with others, he is no more embedded
into a territorial or class community, of which he may be considered
“representative”, nor is he limited to the materiality of objects and ser-
vices. Rather, the individual expects from consumption, now psycholo-
gized as well as personalized, at the same time emotions and pleasures
that are always renewed. But above all he expects a satisfying and joyful
experience of individuation, by affirming his own identity, which the loss
of tradition, community and social roles have made him lose. A new
universe of meanings and symbols, self-coded and recalled when needed,
free as much as possible from any external constraint, which makes hap-
piness available for oneself and oneself for happiness.

3 Four Archetypes and Seven

Metaphorical Figures
The society of hyper-consumption is approached by Lipovetsky in accor-
dance with four interpretative archetypes widespread between current
sociology and philosophy, in the search for what is adequate or not in
each of them. Although in fact the multiplicity of these interpretations,
mostly critical towards today’s reality, present numerous aspects that can
be shared, alone they are not sufficient to grasp the wholeness of the indi-
vidual in this society and above all tend to diminish the positive develop-
ments. In fact, many interpreters lack historical comparison, too often
considering the past better than it was and therefore contesting to the
present a sort of degeneration from a supposed “golden age”. The purpose
of this book is instead to attest all the developments in the level of life, to
 2 Economy of Consumption: Starting with Lipovetsky… 35

the point of recognizing the greatest liberation of the individual in his-

torical terms and precisely therefore extinction.
The main interpretative archetypes and related metaphorical figures
found by Lipovetsky are four: Penia, Dionysus, Superman and Nemesis.
Each of these falls within the description of the hyper-consumer indi-
vidual, yet none fully or better in the properly orthodox sense attributed
to it. Two other archetypal images must be added to them, which trans-
versely concern the previous four: Narcissus and Cronus, both present in a
pressing and peculiar way in hypermodernity. But above all Lipovetsky
recognizes that he is facing an existential multiplicity mostly moving
between dichotomies, which revolve themselves around the idea of the
seventh metaphorical figure: Two-faced Janus, the duality. That is, at the
bottom, the homo felix is characterized by “paradoxical happiness” which
is both wellbeing and ill-being.
Penia, Greek goddess and personification of need and poverty, is the
first archetype mentioned. It represents the “lack” in advanced capitalism
society, a lack above all existential according to critics. Before addressing
what Lipovetsky affirms, it is important to understand that in Greek
mythology, according to Plato’s account in Symposium, Penia is mother of
Eros (Love), who conceives together with Poros, a representation of
research, contrivance and expedience. Penia is not invited to the feast for
the birthday of Aphrodite, because she has no suitable clothes, but enters
secretly and conceives “Love” on the ground, which Plato describes as
follows, through Socrates:

First of all, he is always poor; and he is far from being tender and beautiful,
as the many believe, but is tough, squalid, shoeless, and homeless, always
lying on the ground without a blanket or a bed, sleeping in doorways and
along waysides in the open air; he has the nature of his mother, always
dwelling with neediness. (Bernadete, 2001, p. 33)

Penia is therefore the one who is not invited to the feast of beauty, but
still creeps in. Unwanted guest of advanced capitalism is the lack, which
infiltrates the triumph of hedonism and narcissism, deep down into con-
sumer dynamics of an abundance society. In a secluded place of this feast,
together with the art of arranging oneself, she generates Eros, which has
36 M. Pietropaoli

nothing to do with the rest. Love is born at the feast of beauty, but he is
not the son of Aphrodite, he is the son of lack. This allegory helps to
understand in another way what Lipovetsky will see: the paradox of hap-
piness for the hyper-consumer is that it resides not in what he has but in
what he seeks, starting from what he has. The lack still functions as a
stimulus for the existential satisfaction of today’s individual, who, far
from being fully satisfied with goods and consumption, is increasingly
looking for what he loves and loves what he is looking for.
According to Lipovetsky, the most attentive social observers noted,
starting from the society of mass consumption (the second phase), that
the rise in the standard of living and material wellbeing did not corre-
spond to an increase in happiness, on the contrary, growing discontent
and personal dissatisfaction were spreading. The critics of this process had
attributed the problem to an alienation of the individual towards materi-
alistic things and desires, which, although it could be present in the soci-
ety of mass consumption, is no longer central in the age of
hyper-consumption. The hyper-consumer of the third phase is certainly
linked to comfort and material wellbeing, but now to a point where these
are taken for granted so that his search also as a user of goods is in view
of a very personal existential wellbeing (emotional and experiential).
The disappointment and frustration of today’s individual, despite his
highly advanced and comfortable lifestyle, is not so much oriented on
goods and consumption (which indeed still reserve him joys and enthusi-
asm as well as appreciated usefulness) but rather on the relationship with
other human beings and primarily with himself. Instead of things, it is the
relationships, professional and sentimental, as well as mass experiences,
communication and personal emotions, that make us feel disappointed
for the socio-economic system. The perceived lack does not concern the
hell of material goods and consumption, which would alienate the indi-
vidual from himself, but precisely the hyperbolic search for himself in
terms of love that seems to escape, even with all the material wellbeing.
If a component relating to consumerist desires obviously plays its part
in this, since as Bauman recalls that this “syndrome” also afflicts rela-
tional, work and sentimental processes, making everything become a
commodity to use and discard, it is not the goods in themselves and
material services that generate a lack for the individual. Rather, the
 2 Economy of Consumption: Starting with Lipovetsky… 37

individual, having now reached the satisfaction of means, finds enormous

difficulties in relationships and purposes, which do not respond to his
own existential need in an equally functional way. The “paradoxical hap-
piness” of which Lipovetsky writes is given at the same time by the enor-
mous human (as well as material) development, which requires and
makes the individual demand more and more in terms of emotional
depth and self-understanding.
Along with the material means, or rather once these have been removed
as problematic, the needs have also developed. Thus, the hyper-consumer
focused on complete wellbeing of his person no longer feels the need for
a refrigerator or a washing machine, but for self-affirmation in the work-
place, for deep romantic relationships, for social recognition, that is to
say, at the bottom, for happiness. Nowadays, material goods are no lon-
ger enough to satisfy the individual, to give him pleasure and joy, albeit
momentary, and not because “the hell of things” has been realized on
earth, but because things fully carry out their task and have freed the
individual from once central practical constraints. Except that this indi-
vidual—freed from material want—is no less affected by Penia, because
his personal expectation has also been raised along with his lifestyle.
Now the purpose for everyone is not to survive, or to live decently, but
the pursuit of happiness. Every slowdown, skipped day or step back from
this achievement (which is never progress or possession) generates frus-
tration, disappointment and a sense of failure like never before. Not
because the individual is lacking in things or through things (which
indeed support his fragility), but because he feels cyclically lacking
towards himself, in affirmation of himself and in his own fulfilment, now
outlined on very high levels. “Irony of this time: the civilization of hyper-­
commodities did not create so much alienation towards things, but,
rather, it accentuated the desire to be oneself, the division between one-
self and oneself and between oneself and others, the difficulty to exist as
being-subject” (Lipovetsky, 2006, p. 138).
Of course, as Bauman points out, the very privilege of being an indi-
vidual free and aimed at happiness, because not forced by material pov-
erty, is not a condition that belongs to everyone today (Bauman, 2005).
Postmodern society, fluid and consumerist, is divided into people who
can deal with the existential problem, because the problem of needs is
38 M. Pietropaoli

satisfied, while others in such earthly paradise of goods and possibilities

still remain marginalized. The lack, therefore, also occurs materially in
the society of hyper-consumption and indeed with the needs met all
around it generates even more suffering in those who do not enjoy this
widespread wellbeing. Although the central issue of Penia and happiness
is not strictly related to things, advanced societies present in turn a great
inequality between those who can benefit from goods and consumption
and those who cannot, at least fully.
The focal point here, in which however we can find Lipovetsky’s con-
ception, is that beyond the unbalanced distribution of resources and
beyond the more or less practicable possibilities, in a scenario of collec-
tive hyper-consumption, what dominates in terms of lack and generates
a widespread malaise (both among the upper and middle-lower classes)
concerns autonomy and existential project of the individual. This individ-
ual moves in terms of doing and affirming oneself, in terms of Nietzschean
will to power, self-esteem and recognition from others, in terms of love
and fulfilment of something, not only and not mainly in terms of mate-
rial desires, especially when a basic level of survival and comfort is assured.
In fact, it seems clear that it is not the excess of things, goods and con-
sumption, which generates existential “lack” in widespread terms, as crit-
ics of consumerism denounce, but rather the impossibility for some to
access a satisfactory level of these (and therefore greater production and
distribution would be needed), but above all the difficulty of meeting the
very high expectations of personal happiness. If the unavoidable condi-
tion of happiness historically resides in absence of material poverty (and
even physical or mental), even more so this can be attested to in today’s
society of hyper-consumption, where everyone is allowed to desire the
best for himself. Yet satisfaction of these needs is not enough, even for
those who obtain it, in order to avoid the frustration, discouragement
and cyclical sense of failure that grips them, even in full material wellbeing.
Dionysus, the Greek god of ecstasy, intoxication and liberation of
senses, seems to many interpreters to represent well the dominant aspect
of today’s social reality, identified with hedonism, that is the pursuit of
pleasures. A Dionysian hedonism focused on the present, enjoyment of
the moment and youthfulness. It is no coincidence that his figure is also
taken up by Jung (2018 [1933–1955]) in association with the puer
 2 Economy of Consumption: Starting with Lipovetsky… 39

aeternus. Shadow archetype of the senex, who is rational, controlled,

responsible, the puer is uncontrollable instinct, impulse, eccentricity and
joy. Nietzsche himself opposed the chaotic Dionysian character, typical
in the Greek tragedy of Aeschylus and (in the maximum balance between
the two aspects) of Sophocles, to the Apollonian order of Euripides
(Nietzsche, 1972 [1872]). As “guardian of oblivion”, moreover, Dionysus
is mythologically the one who does not care about the future, who allows
rebirth starting from the liberation of the ego, which in the orgiastic
feasts merges with the fluid becoming of life and living others.
Although all this would suggest an archetypal resemblance to today’s
individual, Lipovetsky disputes these readings starting from the deeper
meaning of “liberator of ego” attributed to Dionysus, who is the God torn
to pieces to then rise again (like Osiris), with a whole range of references
collected by Christianity. In fact, Dionysus is the one who makes “the
principium individuationis explode” (Lipovetsky, 2006, pp. 172–173),
that is to say, he dissolves the individual both in the chaotic flow of life
and in the community of other living beings. Dionysian intoxication and
ecstasy are more self-evasion than self-affirmation, collectivization of
pleasure and not its privatization, while today’s individual wants to find
himself much more than to get lost. The hedonism of the hyper-­consumer
is not at all orgiastic, but personalized, even when it puts in place a sub-
stitute for a collective rite, whether it be themed parties, wild raves or
worldly happenings.
Let us see briefly what characterizes the effective pursuit of pleasures in
hypermodern society, so that the distance of certain behaviours from
Dionysian character is evident, albeit in a certain external resemblance.
More than uncontrolled pleasures, disorder and eccentricity, today’s indi-
vidual focuses on the enjoyment of comforts and “small happinesses”,
seeking serenity and controlled wellbeing (healthy and safe). His space
dedicated to free time and recreation is mostly the home, an intimate
place par excellence, where privatization of pleasures takes place, that is
the opposite of Dionysian collective sharing (which was usually done
outdoors). A logic of free time and consumption in view of leisure that
revolves around one’s personal freedoms, certainly not around the com-
munity needs of regeneration. Home is at the same time a place for rec-
reation, relaxation, intimacy, safety. A controlled space with respect to the
40 M. Pietropaoli

impending and suffocating external, where the individual has (more or

less) full control of himself and his pleasures.
The association itself with others in shared interest groups is mainly
aimed at personal satisfaction, so there is a division of social members
according to tastes, now less and less characterized by “totalizing” fash-
ions and customs, as was still the case up to the 1980s. Rather, there is an
attempt to identify himself and be recognized by others through the sup-
port of a neo-tribalism that does not affect the underlying individualistic
principle (differently from what Maffesoli [1988] says), to the point that
collective reality is revealed in the service of personal self-affirmation. The
others are not part of me, but an instrument of wellbeing (or a threat of
ill-being), to be consumed at the right doses, therefore far from an orgi-
astic mixture.
More than ecstasy and liberation of senses, one seeks serenity and har-
mony, also given the fragility of individuals from a mental health point of
view. Small pleasures, emotional wellbeing, health and physical control,
all aimed at maintaining balance, so as to be able to make the most of the
available experiences. It is not so much a search for superabundance in
things, drinking and eating, sexuality and excitement, luxuries and drugs,
rather a search for “superabundance of existence”, that is, emotions and
sensations, which can be referred to intensity but, more comfortably, is
linked to mere extension or duration. Thus we also understand the
healthy frenzy of an individual who, far from being Dionysiacally heed-
less of time, is terrified by Cronus, so much so as to fragment him into a
thousand moments of alleged activity and thus trusting to live as long as
possible, in order to do more experiences.
Controlled and mostly surrogate experiences, as will be seen in the last
chapter of this book, thanks above all to virtuality of quick connections,
so that it is possible to communicate even from home, relate to others and
experience monitored emotions. Digital sensations that rave about a rev-
olutionary and perverse imagery, even sexual, liberated and pornographi-
cally widespread, coming however into contradiction with an individual’s
daily life completely not eccentric or libertine.
Compared to the ecstasy and intoxication of Dionysus, liberation of
senses and perdition of oneself, hedonism of the hyper-consumer appears
instead controlled, moderate and fundamentally scared. The attempt to
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Amours empêchées

(1er Amant — 2e Amant — l’Obstacle)

A 1 — Mariage empêché par inégalité de rangs : — Nitétis et

le Héros chinois de Métastase, Le Prince Soleil (M. Vasseur, 1889).
Donnée philosopho-sentimentale d’une quantité d’œuvres du XVIIIe
siècle (Nanine, etc.), dans lesquelles invariablement un seigneur
s’éprend d’une vilaine. Chez George Sand, au contraire, ce ne sont
que dames férues de leurs inférieurs : littérature qui occasionna du
moins beaucoup de galantes aventures aux « larbins » de notre
siècle. L’adjonction d’un petit obstacle de plus, — le lien conjugal, —
fournit prétexte à l’intrigue réelle de Ruy Blas.
2 — Mariage empêché par inégalité de fortunes : — Myrtille
(1885) et un peu l’Ami Fritz d’Erckmann-Chatrian, l’Abbé Constantin
(M. Halévy, 1887), même l’action du Rêve (de Zola, par Bruneau,
1890) et du roman « Le Bonheur des Dames », — pour ne citer que
les ouvrages estimables et pour taire la foule de livrets-Scribe et
d’Histoires de Jeunes Hommes pauvres, Dames Blanches, etc., où
de vertigineuses additions et soustractions bruissent aux oreilles,
jusqu’à la multiplication inattendue, dea ex machina, qui égalise
soudain les deux termes du problème, les deux fortunes en scène,
dans le plus admirable et symétrique alignement de zéros parallèles,
— précédés, ô bonheur ! ô ivresse ! d’un côté comme de l’autre, par
deux chiffres identiques !
Il faut bien reconnaître que ces inégalités sociales et
conventionnelles sont de puérils détails et que, si nos amoureux ont
un peu de cœur et de sincérité, ils en triompheront sans peine : il
leur suffira de laisser là titres et écus et d’aller, dans un pays neuf et
sous d’autres noms, recommencer, d’un courageux et commun
accord, leurs destinées. Si, au lieu de pareilles bagatelles, on nous
avait seulement décrit une fois ces obstacles autrement sérieux de
l’inégalité des âges, des forces, des goûts, dont les exemples sont
en même temps beaucoup plus communs !
Ils le sont même tellement qu’on en pourrait établir une théorie :
le premier amour, le premier tiers de la vie amoureuse (20 ans),
cherchant pour objet l’égalité du rang et la supériorité de l’âge (c’est
un fait reconnu de ceux qui ont étudié le cas des filles-mères) ; le
deuxième amour et, en général, la deuxième période de la vie
amoureuse (30 ans), s’adressant, l’audace étant accrue, à des
supérieurs en rang, mais égaux par l’âge ; et enfin, le troisième
amour, et, d’une façon plus générale, la troisième période de la vie
sentimentale, allant de préférence à des inférieurs sociaux moins
âgés. Rien n’empêche, naturellement, de subdiviser.
B — Mariage empêché par des ennemis et des obstacles
éventuels : — Sieba (M. Manzotti, 1883) ; toutes les féeries, depuis
le Zéim de Gozzi, sans compter le reste, hélas ! En somme, ici
s’adapte, — selon les désirs d’un public en état de viduité supportée
sans constance, — le procédé du steeple-chase : mais ce n’est pas
de plusieurs montures et cavaliers rivaux qu’il se compose ; il n’y a,
dans la course, qu’un seul couple d’engagé, en vue d’aboutir, au lieu
du but éclatant, à… la culbute que l’on sait.
C — Mariage empêché par la destination de la jeune fille à
un autre : — Le Roi Pasteur de Métastase, et je ne sais combien
de pièces encore. Les amants mourront d’être séparés, nous
assurent-ils. On ne les voit même pas commencer, mais le
spectateur est assez bon pour les toujours croire sur parole ; les
feux, les braises (selon le langage plus exact du grand siècle), et
autres phénomènes nerveux, ne laissent pas, dans leurs
descriptions d’hypocondriaques, que d’offrir quelque intérêt,… pas
trop longtemps toutefois.
D — Amours d’un ménage empêchées par des beaux-
parents : — Le Roman d’Élise (M. Richard, 1885).
E — Amours…
Ça voyons ! que faisons-nous, co-spectateurs, en cette salle,
devant une telle prétendue situation ? Voici que ces jeunes gens
s’embrassent comme du pain, et qu’ils dessinent toutes sortes
d’attitudes, de pure convention théâtrale, et, probablement,
symboliques d’autres attitudes, qu’ils désireraient prendre dans le
plus bref délai. Allons-nous-en… Quoi vous retient ici ?… Comment,
Madame, vous vous raidissez dans votre fauteuil, toute excitée par
la gesticulation du jeune premier ? eh bien, mais… et son amie qui
est là, ne vous souvenez-vous plus que c’est elle qu’il désire ? ou
jouent-ils donc tous deux si mal, leur dialogue a-t-il donc si peu de
naturel que vous oubliiez l’histoire et croyiez entendre un
monologue, une déclaration, — à vous s’adressant peut-être ?…
Bon ! et voilà Monsieur à présent, lèvre pendante, les yeux jaillissant
dans sa jumelle, et, avec avidité, suivant les remous intérieurs au
corset de l’actrice ! dites donc, brave homme, m’est avis qu’un autre
est prêt à passer avant vous ? Au moins, soyez logique, que diable !
Sautez sur la scène, cassez-moi les reins de ce bellâtre, et prenez
sa place !…
Lamentable retour à la promiscuité, dans ces salles surchauffées
comme des lupanars et que le prêtre a presque raison de
condamner ! Se réunit-on ici pour approfondir la chorestique de
l’amour ? Ouvrez franchement, en ce cas, de grandes écoles de
courtisanes… Est-ce pour les bénéfices du trottoir, tout à l’heure,
qu’on prépare ici le public ?… De l’air ! de l’air !
O souffle vivifiant et orageux du drame dionysien ! Eschyle, où
es-tu, toi qui aurais rougi de représenter de l’amour autre chose,
dans tes œuvres, que les crimes et les infamies ? Ne voyons-nous
pas encore quelle hauteur ont ces chastes sommets de l’art
moderne : Macbeth et Athalie !
… Mais quoi ? s’indigner ?… Oh ! que non ! Mon attention
revenant de ces cimes sur la scène actuelle, je ne me sens plus
accablé. Et j’éclate d’un bon rire !… Ces personnages-ci ? mais ce
sont des fantoches de comédie, — simplement ! Et les peines de
leurs maladroits auteurs à les vouloir renfrogner en dépit de leur
nature font une excellente charge ! Dans des mains autrement
intelligentes, est-ce que les meilleurs de nos drames où l’amour
avait quelque importance (sans encore avoir la première, comme
dans cette XXVIIIe) ne retournaient pas, d’eux-mêmes, logiquement,
à l’indulgence du sourire ? Le Cid qui en est le type classique est
une tragi-comédie, et dans Roméo et Juliette tous les personnages
ambiants sont franchement comiques.
Cependant, notre dramaturgie aveugle essouffle ses gravités en
ce rythme équivoque, avec obstination : que la pièce traite de
sociologie, de politique, de religion, des procédés de la peinture, du
titre des successions, de l’exploitation des mines, de l’invention d’un
fusil, de la découverte d’un produit chimique, de quoi que ce soit… il
y faut une histoire d’amour ! nous n’y échapperons pas !… En vérité,
c’est à faire rire et à énerver, à la façon d’un chatouillement à la
plante des pieds : comment ! savants, révolutionnaires, poètes,
généraux, prêtres, ne se présentent à nous que pour,
immédiatement, se mettre en devoir de faire la bête à deux dos !
Mais c’est du délire ! Et encore veut-on nous faire prendre cette scie
au sérieux !…
Oui-dà. Et c’est le théâtre actuel.
Seul, à mon avis, M. de Chirac en a été le fils courageusement
logique, — quoique réprouvé, — la société, semblable aux vieilles
coquettes, réservant toujours quelques péchés secrets et ne
craignant rien à l’égal de la nudité, qui mettrait à néant la légende de
ses imaginaires appâts vicieux, voilés, laisse-t-elle volontiers croire,
sous son hypocrisie.
 … Quel grotesque aspect aura notre ithyphallie, une fois figée
dans l’histoire, quand nous serons enfin revenus à l’antique bon
sens !
 XXIX e SITUATION
Aimer ennemi

(L’Ennemi aimé — Celui qui l’aime — Celui qui le hait)

A — L’Aimé est haï par les proches de qui l’aime : — J’y

absorberais volontiers la Situation précédente. — 1, L’Aimé est
poursuivi par les frères de celle qui l’aime : — La Duchesse
d’Amalfi de Webster, le Cœur brisé de Ford.
2 — Il est haï par la famille de celle qui l’aime : — L’histoire
de Yayati de Roudra dêva (c’est la vraie couleur indigène de ces
rivalités indoues où la jalousie n’a presque rien à voir), la Victoire de
Pradyoumna par Samara dikchita, Caton de Métastase, la Grande
Marnière (M. Ohnet, 1888).
3 — L’Aimé est fils d’un homme haï par les parents de celle
qui aime : — La Taverne des Trabans (1881) et Les Rantzau (1882)
d’Erckmann-Chatrian.
4 — L’Aimé est l’ennemi du parti de celle qui aime : —
Madhouranirouddha de Vira le contemporain de Corneille, les
Scythes de Voltaire, Almanzor d’Henri Heine, Lakmé (Delibes,
1888), les Carbonari (M. Nô, 1882), Madame Thérèse (Erckmann-
Chatrian, 1882), Lydie (M. Miral, 1882).
B 1 — L’aimé est le meurtrier du père de celle qui aime : —
Le Cid (et l’opéra qui en est issu), Olympie de Voltaire.
 2 — L’aimée est la meurtrière du père de celui qui aime : —
Mademoiselle de Bressier (M. Delpit, 1887).
3 — L’aimée est la meurtrière du frère de celui qui aime :
— La Reine Fiammette (M. Mendès, 1889).
4 — L’Aimé est le meurtrier du mari de celle qui aime, mais
qui, jadis, jura de venger ce mari : — Irène de Voltaire.
5 — Même cas, mais où, au lieu d’un mari, il s’agit d’un amant :
— Fédora (M. Sardou, 1882).
6 — L’Aimé est le meurtrier d’un parent de celle qui aime :
— Roméo et Juliette (c’est la « Situation » que j’indique ; elle se
modifie en celle de l’« Enlèvement », Xe, puis par un triple effet de la
XXXVIe, « Perdre les siens », la première fois avec une erreur, la
deuxième simplement, et la troisième d’une façon double et
simultanée chez les familles des deux personnages principaux) ;
Bonheur et malheur du nom et le Geôlier de soi-même (Calderon).
7 — L’Aimée est la fille du meurtrier du père de celui qui
aime : — Le Crime de Jean Morel (M. Samson, 1890), la Marchande
de sourires (Mme Judith Gautier, 1888).
L’élément capital des émotions est donc le même que dans la Ve
(Traqué), et l’amour sert, ici, surtout à présenter l’homme traqué
sous divers jours sympathiques ayant une unité. Celle qu’il aime
joue un peu le rôle du chœur grec. Supprimez en effet l’amour,
remplacez-le par un lien aussi faible que vous en pourrez tisser un,
ne mettez même rien à sa place : un drame de l’espèce Ve, avec
toutes ses terreurs, vous restera. Essayez, au contraire, de
retrancher l’autre partie, l’inimitié, la vengeance à assouvir, et de les
remplacer par un différend sans importance, — ou bien négligez de
les remplacer ; que vous restera-t-il comme émotion tragique ? Rien.
J’ai donc raison de le dire, l’amour, — excellent motif de
comédie, meilleur pour la farce, — doux ou poignant (et encore !…)
dans le livre lu, solitairement, et dont on se croit le « héros » ou
l’« héroïne », — l’amour n’est pas, en réalité, tragique, malgré la
virtuosité qui a réussi, parfois, à lui en donner l’apparence, et malgré
l’opinion de l’époque érotomane qui s’achève.
 XXX e SITUATION
L’Ambition

(L’Ambitieux — Ce qu’il convoite — L’Adversaire)

Action très intellectuelle, sans modèle antique, — et à distance

respectueuse de laquelle s’est généralement tenue la médiocrité.
A — Ambition guettée par un proche ou ami patriote ; 1 —
par un frère : — Timoléon d’Alfieri. Ex. historique (comique, c’est-
à-dire feint) : Lucien et Napoléon Bonaparte.
2 — Par un parent ou obligé : — Jules César de
Shakespeare, La Mort de César de Voltaire, Brutus II d’Alfieri. Dans
La Mort de César reparaît la XIXe (Tuer un proche inconnu), tant le
désir de rappeler quelque œuvre ancienne était vif !
3 — Par des partisans : — Wallenstein de Schiller, Cromwell
de Hugo.
B — L’Ambition séditieuse (parenté avec A 1 de la VIIIe) : — Sir
Thomas Wyat de Webster, Perkin Warbeck de Ford, Catilina de
Voltaire. Ex. fragm. : Insurrection de Cade dans la 2e partie d’Henri
IV de Shakespeare. Histoire : le Boulangisme, selon l’opinion
actuelle.
C — L’Ambition, l’avidité entassant les crimes : — Macbeth,
Richard III, partie des Cinq doigts de Birouk (M. Decourcelle, 1883).
Roman : La Fortune des Rougon ; (avec atténuation des crimes en
simples manquements à la dignité) : Son Excellence Eugène ;
(sacrifice de la moralité) : l’histoire de Lucien de Rubempré ; cas
d’avidité : La Terre.
L’Ambition, de nos passions la plus puissante, si même elle n’est
pas la passion par excellence, impressionnera toujours avec force le
spectateur ; car il sent bien que celle-là, une fois née dans un
homme, ne peut plus mourir qu’avec cet homme. Et que d’objets elle
convoite ! La tyrannie, un rang élevé, des honneurs, une fortune (par
héritage, mariage, vol, etc.), la conservation intacte des richesses
(avarice), la gloire (politique, scientifique, littéraire, inventive,
artistique), la célébrité, la vanité (coquetterie, distinction).
On a vu, pour A, les liens qui peuvent unir l’Ambitieux à
l’Adversaire, les Situations qui en résultent (XIXe, XXIIIe, XXIXe).
Entre mille, voici une manière d’exaspérer l’enragement de C :
mêlez-y la sincérité d’une foi, d’une conviction, ce qui advint pour les
Espagnols au Pérou et en Flandre, pour notre race « spirituelle et
douce » sous la Ligue et sous la Terreur, pour Calvin, pour
l’Inquisition, etc.
 XXXI e SITUATION
Lutte contre Dieu

(Mortel — Immortel)

La plus anciennement traitée.

Dans cette Babel des constructions théâtrales, toutes ou presque
toutes les autres peuvent entrer à l’aise. Car elle est par excellence
la Lutte ; elle est aussi la plus grande folie et la plus grande
imprudence, elle offre le but le plus inouï aux ambitions,
audacieuses tentatives, conspirations titanesques, enlèvements
ixioniens, la plus captivante énigme ; l’idéal y subit un rare assaut de
passions ; des rivalités monstrueuses s’engagent. Alentour, les
témoins n’aiment-ils pas souvent celui qu’ils devraient haïr ?
n’apprennent-ils pas son crime et ne doivent-ils pas le punir parfois
eux-mêmes, le sacrifier tout au moins à leur foi, ou s’immoler, âme et
corps, pour lui ? Entre les proches les plus unis, des haines éclatent.
Puis voici le vent des désastres, le vaincu cloué au malheur,
foudroyé devant ceux qu’il aime, à moins que, comble d’horreur !
transporté par un aveugle délire, il n’ait été les déshonorant ou les
massacrant sans les reconnaître. Bientôt, à la recherche du cher
disparu, les suppliants s’acheminent en tristes théories, et tentent de
désarmer la rancune. Mais la divine vengeance est déchaînée !…
Ce groupement admirable, — on l’ignore à peu près de nos
jours : byronisants que nous sommes encore en ces années, nous
devrions pourtant songer à cette superbe attaque du ciel. Mais non !
Traitons-nous même le sujet évangélique de la Passion, nous
passerons, comme hiboux en plein jour, juste à côté de la donnée
véritablement dramatique, et nous contenterons de balancer, avec
un nasillement contrit, les phrases idyllo-didactiques qui précédèrent
la tragédie sacrée, et puis l’escamoterons, celle-ci, sans la voir…
A 1 — Lutte contre un Dieu : — Les Édoniens et les
Bassares, Penthée et les Cardeuses de laine, d’Eschyle ; les
Bacchantes d’Euripide ; Agavé de Stace ; le Christ souffrant de
Saint-Grégoire de Nazianze. Épopée : l’hymne homérique VIe (à
Dionysos) ; le rêve de Jacob.
2 — Lutte contre les fidèles d’un Dieu : — L’Exode des
Hébreux par Ézéchiel, Athalie. Histoire : les persécutions diverses.
Épopée : les Martyrs.
B 1 — Dispute contre un Dieu : — Le livre de Job. Je ne
saurais, il est vrai, dire à quelle date ni devant quelle rampe la
« première » de Job eut jamais lieu ; mais le fait de la représentation
par MM. A. B. C. et Mlles X. Y. Z. n’est pas plus, pour l’existence
absolue d’un drame, une condition nécessaire qu’il n’en est une
suffisante. Mettons que cette « première » aura été donnée sur le
Théâtre dont parle la légende brahmanique, théâtre inauguré assez
longtemps avant ceux des hommes, et grâce auquel les Dieux
occupent les loisirs de leur éternité.
2 — Châtiment du mépris d’un Dieu : — Tchitra Yadjgna de
Vedyanatha Vatchespati, le Festin de Pierre (l’action véritable,
s’entend, celle qui amène le dénouement depuis le début).
3 — Châtiment de l’orgueil vis-à-vis d’un Dieu : — Ajax
Locrien (selon une des hypothèses) d’Eschyle, Thamiras de
Sophocle, Bellérophon d’Euripide. Ex. chrétien : Simon le Magicien.
4 — Rivalité orgueilleuse à l’égard d’un Dieu : — Les
Nourrices d’Eschyle, Niobé de Sophocle.
5 — Rivalité imprudente avec un Dieu : — Eumèle de
Sophocle, en partie Phaéton d’Euripide.
 XXXII e SITUATION
Jalousie erronée

(Le Jaloux — l’Objet pour la possession duquel il est jaloux —

le Complice supposé — l’Occasion ou l’Auteur de l’erreur)

Ce dernier élément n’est pas personnifié (A), ou il l’est dans un

traître (B), qui parfois est le vrai rival du jaloux (C).
A 1 — L’erreur provient de l’esprit soupçonneux du
jaloux : — Le pire n’est pas toujours certain de Calderon, la
Comédie des Méprises de Shakespeare, l’Esclave de Massinger,
Marianne et Tancrède de Voltaire, la Princesse de Bagdad (M.
Dumas), Un Divorce (M. Moreau, 1884). Comment Molière n’a-t-il
pas fait une comédie du Jaloux sur cette donnée symétrique à celle
de l’Avare ?
2 — L’Erreur jalouse est produite par un hasard fatal : —
Zaïre de Voltaire et l’opéra de ce nom par M. de la Nux (1890) ;
partie de Lucrèce Borgia.
3 — Jalousie erronée devant un cas d’amour demeuré
purement platonique : — Le Sacrifice d’amour de Ford (où
l’épouse est injustement soupçonnée) ; l’Esclave du devoir (M.
Valnay, 1881 ; c’est surtout, ici, l’adorateur respectueux qui est
soupçonné à tort).
 4 — Jalousie née à tort de rumeurs malveillantes : — Le
Père prodigue de M. Dumas, le Maître de forges (M. Ohnet, 1883).
B 1 — Jalousie Suggérée par un traître qu’a poussé la
haine : — Othello et Beaucoup de bruit pour rien de Shakespeare ;
la Sémiramis reconnue de Métastase en est le dénouement
développé.
2 — Même cas, où le traître est poussé par l’intérêt : —
Cymbeline de Shakespeare.
3 — Même cas, où le traître est poussé par l’intérêt et la
jalousie : — Intrigue et Amour de Schiller.
C 1 — Jalousie réciproque suggérée à deux époux par une
rivale (devenue rivale par orgueil) : — Le Portrait de Massinger.
2 — Jalousie suggérée au mari par un soupirant éconduit :
— Artémire de Voltaire, le Chevalier Jean (M. Joncières, 1885).
3 — Jalousie suggérée au mari par une femme qui en est
éprise : — Malheur aux pauvres (M. Bouvier, 1881).
4 — Jalousie suggérée à l’épouse par une rivale
dédaignée : — Les Phtiotides de Sophocle.
5 — Jalousie suggérée à un amant heureux par le mari
trompé : — Jalousie (M. Vacquerie, 1888).
Le nombre d’éléments dramatiques mis en jeu fait déjà prévoir
une quantité très grande de combinaisons pour cette situation, —
dont le public est toujours disposé, du reste, à accepter les
invraisemblances, fussent-elles énormes. Sans abuser de cette
indulgence particulière, nous remarquons, du premier coup d’œil,
que presque tous les drames ci-dessus traitent de la jalousie chez
l’homme et non chez la femme ; or l’expérience nous montre les
femmes tout aussi enclines que les hommes à se laisser égarer par
une envieuse, une rivale, ou par quelque soupirant décidé à tirer, de
leur douleur, un plaisir hors de sa portée sans cela. Traduire au
féminin les cas que nous vîmes nous donnera donc une nombreuse
série de données nouvelles. — En dehors de l’orgueil, de l’intérêt, de
l’amour, du dépit et des rivalités, il se présente beaucoup d’autres
mobiles pour le traître ou la traîtresse ; les mobiles énoncés aussi
peuvent se peindre sous des nuances non encore usitées. — Le
dénouement (en général un meurtre rapide et direct ; dans un seul
cas, un suicide, et, dans un autre, un divorce) prête à être varié,
raffiné, et fortifié de personnages secondaires et instrumentaux. J’en
dirai autant pour les divers nœuds de l’intrigue, — pour ces fausses
preuves, ces suggestions diaboliques d’où jaillira la jalousie.
 XXXIII e SITUATION
Erreur judiciaire

(Celui qui se trompe — Celui qui en est victime — Celui ou ce

qui trompe — le vrai Coupable)

Par erreur judiciaire j’entends toute espèce d’erreur de jugement,

ne se commît-elle que dans la pensée d’une seule personne, au
détriment d’une autre.
Je partagerai les exemples que j’en fournis en quatre classes.
Dans la 1re, la prétendue faute est imaginaire, et un simple hasard a
produit l’erreur fatale. Dans la 2e classe, il y a eu faute commise ;
mais, au lieu du vrai coupable, c’est un innocent qui est poursuivi ;
toutefois personne n’a égaré volontairement sur celui-ci les
soupçons. Dans la 3e classe, au contraire, quelqu’un a dirigé par
vengeance ou intérêt cette injuste accusation sur un ennemi
personnel. Enfin, dans la 4e, ce perfide calomniateur est le criminel
lui-même, qui fait ainsi poursuivre un innocent à sa place.
A 1 — Faux soupçons où la foi était nécessaire : — La
Femme serpent de Gozzi, l’Étudiant pauvre (M. Millœcker, 1889).
S’y rattache, de loin, une des faces de l’Henri VI de Shakespeare,
laquelle consiste en l’incompréhension du réel caractère de ce jeune
prince par les témoins de ses désordres. Bizarre résultat de
l’homonymie : l’Henri de Navarre, chez Dumas père, nous est peint
méconnu de la même façon par son entourage.
 2 — Faux soupçons (où la jalousie n’est pour rien) contre sa
maîtresse : — une partie de la Diane d’Augier, Marie Stuart d’Alfieri.
3 — Faux soupçons nés d’une attitude incomprise d’un
être aimé : — Le Corbeau de Gozzi, Hypsipyle de Métastase,
Theodora (M. Sardou, 1884) ; une partie de la Reine Fiammette.
B 1 — Ces faux soupçons sont attirés sur soi pour sauver
un ami : — Aimer sans savoir qui de Lope, Me Ambros (M. Widor,
1886).
2 — Ils retombent sur un innocent : — Siroès de Métastase,
la grande Iza (M. Bouvier, 1882), le Fiacre no 13 et Gavroche (M.
Dornay, 1887 et 1888). — Ils retombent sur l’innocent mari de
la coupable : — La Criminelle (M. Delacour, 1882).
3 — Même cas, où pourtant l’innocent eut une intention
coupable : — Jean Cévenol (M. Fraisse, 1885) ; — où l’innocent se
croit coupable : — Le Roi de l’argent (M. Milliet, 1885).
4 — Un témoin du crime dans l’intérêt d’un être aimé laisse
tomber l’accusation sur un innocent : — Le Secret de la
Terreuse (M. Busnach, 1889). C’est déjà presque :
C 1 — On laisse l’erreur s’abattre sur un ennemi : — La
Pieuvre (M. Morel, 1885).
2 — L’erreur judiciaire est provoquée par un ennemi : —
Les Palamèdes de Sophocle et d’Euripide, le Ventre de Paris (Zola,
1887). Cette sous-nuance eut seule, on le voit, le privilège d’attirer
les tragiques grecs qui étaient comme tourmentés de la conception
du Iago de plus tard, et tentaient d’y aboutir par des déformations
successives, des enlaidissements de l’Odysseus primitif ; ne semble-
t-il pas qu’on assiste, devant ce travail, à l’enfantement du futur
Diable, du Judas évangélique, de même qu’à celui du type de Jésus
dans les Prométhées et les Dionysos ? La donnée C 2 me paraît
singulièrement belle : c’est, par exemple, le cas de la lettre
anonyme ; et l’on m’accordera qu’il est impossible d’imaginer une
gargouille plus admirablement répugnante que l’individu accroupi
plume aux griffes et avec son vil sourire, au bord d’une telle
besogne !
 3 — L’erreur judiciaire est dirigée sur la victime par le
frère de celle-ci. Il y a donc, de plus, « Haine de proches » (XIIIe) :
— Les Brigands de Schiller, don Garzia d’Alfieri.
D 1 — Les faux soupçons sont dirigés par le vrai coupable
sur un de ses ennemis : — Clitandre de Corneille, et Sapho
(Gounod, 1884), Catherine la Bâtarde (M. Bell, 1881).
2 — Ils sont dirigés par le vrai coupable sur la seconde des
victimes qu’il a visées dès le début. C’est du machiavélisme pur :
obtenir la mort de la seconde victime en la faisant punir à tort du
meurtre de la première ; ajoutez à cela la parenté la plus étroite
entre ces deux victimes et le juge trompé, et vous aurez toutes ces
émotions réunies : apprendre la mort d’un proche, — croire à une
haine impie entre deux proches, — croire même à un second cas de
ce crime, aggravé cette fois du dessein de révolte, — enfin être forcé
de frapper un être aimé, cru coupable. Cette intrigue est donc
éminemment savante, puisqu’elle groupe, sous l’impulsion d’une
ambition ou d’une vengeance, quatre autres Situations. Quant au
« machiavélisme » qui a mis tout en branle, il a consisté pour celui
qui l’employa précisément dans la méthode habituelle à l’écrivain,
méthode transportée ici à un personnage ; c’est-à-dire que celui-ci
s’abstrait du drame et, comme l’auteur, inspire aux autres
personnages les sentiments nécessaires, déroule devant leurs pas
les circonstances indispensables, pour les faire mécaniquement
aboutir au dénouement voulu. C’est ce qui arrivera dans Artaxerce
de Métastase. — Supprimez, en effet, le traître, et supposez que
l’auteur ait visé le dénouement désiré par ce traître, à savoir la
conséquence la plus rigoureuse entre un « fratricide supposé » et le
« devoir de frapper un fils ». L’écrivain ne combinera pas autrement
ses moyens. Le type du Traître (qui a pris successivement tous les
costumes, hier celui du jésuite, aujourd’hui celui du déjà banal
banquier juif) n’est donc pas autre chose que l’auteur lui-même
masqué de noir et nouant l’une à l’autre deux ou trois situations
dramatiques… Il est, ce type, de la famille du si poétique Prologue,
du Deus ex machina (plus haut et plus admissible), de l’Orateur des
parabases, du Valet moliéresque et du Théoricien (bon docteur,
curé, journaliste, ami de la famille ou « des femmes »). C’est le vieux
Narrateur du temps des monodrames.
Rien de plus naïf, par conséquent, que cette artificielle créature,
qui mainte fois a ramené la chute du théâtre par l’invraisemblance.
3 — Les faux soupçons sont égarés sur un rival : — Diana
(M. Paladilhe, 1885), l’Ogre (M. Marthold, 1890).
4 — Ils sont égarés sur un innocent parce qu’il refusa sa
complicité : — La Tragédie de Valentinien de Beaumont et Fletcher,
Aétius de Métastase.
5 — Ils sont dirigés par une femme abandonnée sur
l’amant qui la quitta afin de ne pas tromper un mari : — Roger-
la-Honte (M. Mary, 1888).
6 — Lutte pour se réhabiliter et se venger d’une erreur
judiciaire causée à dessein : — La Dégringolade (M. Desnard,
1881), fin du Fiacre no 13, — et à peu près tous les romans-
feuilletons depuis soixante ans.
 XXXIV e SITUATION
Remords

(Le Coupable — la Victime (ou la faute) — l’Interrogateur)

A 1 — Remords d’un crime inconnu : — Manfred et les autres

conceptions de Byron, le dernier des dramaturges anglais ; il fut
aussi le dernier adversaire du Cant, qui après avoir tué l’art en
Espagne sous le nom d’inquisition, en Angleterre une première fois
sous le nom de puritanisme et en Allemagne sous le nom de
piétisme, se présente aujourd’hui chez nous sous les traits de…
Monsieur Bérenger.
2 — Remords d’un parricide : — Les Euménides d’Eschyle,
les Orestes d’Euripide, de Voltaire et d’Alfieri.
3 — Remords d’un assassinat : — Crime et Châtiment
(Dostoïewsky, 1888), le Cœur révélateur (d’après Poe, par M.
Laumann, 1889).
4 — Remords du meurtre d’un époux : — Thérèse Raquin de
Zola, Pierrot assassin de sa femme (M. Paul Margueritte, 1888).
B 1 — Remords d’une faute d’amour : — Madeleine (Zola,
1889).
2 — Remords d’un adultère : — Le Comte Witold (M.
Rzewuski, 1889).