À l'ère de la défiance - Julie Pagis - Semaine de la Pop Philosophie

Julie Pagis, sociologist Lecture followed by a discussion with journalist Léo Purguette (La Marseillaise)

The dark side of red prophets

Creating a better world, but at what cost? Can utopia be embodied in a single person? Why and how do charismatic leaders win us over? What are the individual and collective mechanisms behind this seduction? In a long and eventful investigation, I sought to exhume the history, buried in secrecy, of the members of a Maoist community haunted by a ghost, that of the “leader”: Fernando. Over the course of the 1970s, the initial attraction exerted by this fifteen-years-older Spanish worker imperceptibly became control. I will shed new light on the workings of charisma, the mechanisms of domination, and the structural nature of violence, particularly gender-based violence, behind the silence. These excesses and traps of seduction transcend eras and generations. Could this be a way to prevent our dreams from ending fatally in the cemetery of utopias?