Après #METOO, l'érotisme ? - Dork Zabunyan - Semaine de la Pop Philosophie

Dork Zabunyan, film theorist Conversation with author and filmmaker Ysé Sorel

The eroticization of power (and ways of evading its seduction)

In the 1970s, Michel Foucault questioned the strange attraction power could arouse: not the power one wants to conquer and retain at all costs, but the power one desires, even when one is subjected to it and shares no interests with those who exercise it. This attraction does not necessarily arise from the physical elegance of those in power, since heads of state entirely lacking bodily presence put into practice, to use Foucault’s expression, an extremely effective “eroticization of power.” This erotic relationship with the exercise of power rests in particular on a circulation of images whose source and destination must be examined: in the shared worlds they sketch out, and in the affects of division they disseminate. This questioning is all the more necessary as a new kind of monstrosity in politics is increasingly asserting itself today, renewing the visual coordinates of collective action. What, then, is this love of power that separates us from ourselves as well as from others? And what image-based strategies might enable us, if not to escape it, at least to thwart it?

Dork Zabunyan and Ysé Sorel