Illusions and Hopes The 2017 Presidential Election in France

The 2017 presidential election in France highlights a problem facing many countries, and France in particular. Having become secularized, transformed into civil and civic societies, they fail to establish an explicit relationship with politics-that is, with rights, morals, and ethics, with ideologies (to combat them), and above all with what I call "boundary markers," notably gift-giving and authority. The danger lies here: a substitute politics, as has already happened, may succeed in replacing, at least in part, the politics common to all human societies, even those that justify their legitimacy and legitimacy by appealing to a Wholly Other external to themselves. Substitute politics is based on the idea of race and draws from it the most destructive consequences for living together. It is against the reappearance of this great danger that I call for a struggle.