POLITICAL FICTIONS

A French scholar addresses the storytelling—to say nothing of the fabulations—that underlie politics.

Early in this sometimes difficult text, which owes much to fellow Collège de France professor Michel Foucault, Boucheron distinguishes analytical logic from fiction, noting that whereas the former gives the illusion that the world is logical, the latter “reveals to us the possibilities of thought.” The stories that critique or shore up political discourses, whether, as Boucheron goes on to examine, the films of Charlie Chaplin or medieval art and modern novels, describe “a reality that does not yet exist.” Yet sometimes it does: As Boucheron, a medievalist, writes, numerous monarchs have attempted to legitimate their rule by revealing dreams that placed them in world-changing contexts. One was the English king William II, who, troubled by a dream in which he consumed human flesh, sought the counsel of a priest, who told him boldly and baldly that he had consumed Christ, “and being a tyrant you devoured him whole.” Fictions differ from facts, of course; in a sharp analysis, the author distinguishes lies, which acknowledge that there is an objective truth, from the “bullshit” of Donald Trump and minions: “The bullshitter couldn’t care less about truth and is just looking to dominate.” Boucheron’s text, drawn from a series of lectures, is sometimes repetitive, both allusive and elusive, and often nebulous in a Parisian intellectual sort of way (and never mind that he snaps, “Intellectuals are the first to concede to tyranny because it allows them, basically, to set themselves off from the people”). All the same, in a narrative that wanders from the subversions of medieval epics to the cynical prescriptions of Machiavelli, Boucheron closes with a dour and timely note from Klaus Mann about how power works: “It’s as if people are afflicted with a kind of physical repugnance for the truth.”

A nimble work of political philosophy and history that probes the stories told by tyrants and patriots.