The Trouble with Balance: On Immunology, Politics, and French Literature in the 21st Century

In the first decade of our century, democracy received two diagnoses. They concluded that democracy was threatened by violent emotions, which it vitally needed at the same time. Jacques Ranciere's La haine de la democratie (2005) and Stephane Hessel's Indignez-vous! (2010) signaled the end of the short-lived peace between hormones. This peace - or state of homeostasis - followed a twentieth-century hormonal politics that knew two extremes: the politics of hate (Orwell) and the politics of pharmacological consent (Huxley, Lem). The author briefly characterizes the hormonal politics of late modernity by discussing the approach of several French writers toward 1968 as a moment of effort to change the social immune system: Jean Marie Gustave le Clezio, Virginie Despentes, Patric Deville, and Michel Houllebecq.