Presence and governance of minds

Faced with the emergence of a “psychopolitics” that governs our interiorities, presence to oneself seems to me to be the necessary antidote to the normative controls that colonize our minds and affects.

Law enters the psyche as a new form of governance

Since Marie-France Hirigoyen’s pioneering work on psychological harassment in the 1990s, our legal system has crossed an important and constructive threshold. Her book Psychological Harassment: Perverse Violence in Daily Life (1998) made it possible to name and legally recognize previously invisible violence. This recognition led to the social modernization law of 2002, inscribing psychological harassment in the Labor Code and the Penal Code. The France Télécom trials (2019) marked a turning point: for the first time, company executives were convicted of institutional psychological harassment that led to a wave of suicides (thirty-five between 2008 and 2009). The court recognized that management methods could constitute systemic psychological violence.

As highlighted by Géraldine Aïdan, a legal scholar at CNRS, in her article Psychopolitics: Toward a Government of Minds (AOC, January 2025), we are witnessing the emergence of a “psychopolitics” where “the State governs minds as well as bodies”. Law no longer merely regulates physical conduct; it penetrates our psychological states, intentions, emotions, traumas, and suffering. This evolution marks, according to Aïdan, “a new threshold of modernity” that surpasses Foucauldian biopolitics. Eco-anxiety damages, states of shock in assault victims, psychological violence exercised through artificial intelligence: all these psychological realities are now grasped by law. Like everything, this has a positive aspect, such as the recognition of psychological harassment, and a negative aspect, the judgment of intentions and not just acts, among others.

This legal recognition of the psyche, in order to function, must necessarily rely on a normative narrative. Indeed, law does not describe an objective reality; it institutes a social truth based on presuppositions about what constitutes an “average psychological individual.” Thus, when law evaluates moral damage or criminal intent, it projects a norm of what should be felt or thought in a given situation. This normativity of law clearly shows that societies, whatever they may be, construct psychological standards that become instruments of governance.

The multiple faces of control: from crimes of passion to toxic management

The Cantat-Trintignant affair (the beating death of Marie Trintignant by Bertrand Cantat in 2003) tragically illustrates how contemporary Western society romanticizes control by calling it passion. What was presented as a “crime of passion” was in reality a characterized situation of control: constant surveillance through text messages, unjustified presence on film sets, anger legitimized by love. As Judith Herman analyzed in Trauma and Recovery (1992), psychological control creates a state of invisible captivity where the victim, progressively isolated and dependent, loses their capacity for autonomy. Marie Trintignant was under the control of a personality we now qualify as toxic, but which the judicial and media narrative romanticized, and unfortunately continues to do so today.

This mechanism of control does not stop at physical murder. Kristina Rady, Bertrand Cantat’s former partner at the time, who testified in his favor during the trial stating he was not violent, committed suicide years later, to escape from the control he had over her (as proven by the messages she sent to her family about this). She too died from this control. Psychiatrist Saverio Tomasella, in Toxic Relationships (2019), describes control as a progressive psychological colonization where “the other becomes the existential center of gravity, progressively emptying the subject of their own substance”. This colonization paradoxically offers a form of security: it avoids facing oneself, but at the cost of a psychological death, which often precedes physical death.

My personal experience confirms this. For over twenty years, I lived under control, a control that resulted in the suicide of my eldest son, himself captive to these destructive mechanisms. I bear my share of responsibility in this tragedy: having accepted this colonization of self that reassures as much as it destroys. In this configuration, no one is legally responsible for a young man’s suicide. Control kills without law always being able to apprehend it. Bertrand Cantat killed with his hands and was convicted for it, with far too much clemency compared to common sense; but for Kristina Rady’s suicide, the control remains legally invisible.

The norm as collective control

The normative narrative that structures our law reveals a broader control: that of social norms over our psyches. Take the evolution of the legal status of so-called “honor” crimes. In France before 1975, a husband could invoke his wife’s adultery as a mitigating circumstance in case of murder. The norm of the time even valued this act as a legitimate restoration of masculine honor. Today, this same act is severely condemned and socially stigmatized. Law has not discovered an objective truth; it has changed its normative narrative.

As Philippe Descola shows in Beyond Nature and Culture (2005), each society constructs its own ontology, its way of conceiving what exists and what has value. Western law, by progressively recognizing an interiority in animals, ecosystems, even rivers, like the Whanganui River in New Zealand which became a legal person in 2017, reveals the extension of this psychopolitics beyond the human. But this recognition remains prisoner to anthropocentrism: it is still humans who exercise the rights of these non-human entities, as Géraldine Aïdan aptly notes.

To continue on the subject of romantic relationships, Geni Núñez’s work, Decolonizing Affects (2025), offers a refreshing perspective. Infused with the poetics of her Guarani people, the author reminds us that our Western conception of exclusive love and monogamy is merely a historical construction, imposed by colonization, a vision I discovered and which greatly enlightened me. In the Guarani language, she explains, “instead of saying we possess something, we say we are in its company”. This absence of possessiveness in affects opens other ways of loving, freed from proprietary control that characterizes Western affective norms.

Presence as resistance to the governance of minds

Faced with this new psychopolitics, recognized for governing our interiorities, for better and for worse, I propose presence to oneself as a form of resistance. Presence is not merely critical thinking or autonomous thought; it is a lived experience through oneself that does not refer only to dominant norms. It requires what I call a “cultivated cultural openness”: going to drink from multiple sources, meeting radically different people, reading texts that decenter our gaze. Not just ethnological texts written by Westerners about others, but thoughts from elsewhere that speak to us from their own center.

This presence demands recognizing control where it hides, including and especially in what we defend with conviction as being “normal.” At the beginning of the 21^st Century, we are living through a moment of sophisticated obscurantism, notably through what I identify as a scientistic religion. Contemporary medicine, infiltrated by financial interests, illustrates this drift well: it has every interest in maintaining populations in a state of therapeutic dependence rather than promoting autonomous health. The Covid crisis was the most blatant example, where health prevention was simply forbidden by law! Doctors who prescribed prevention were struck off. Patients become captive consumers of patented chemistry, generating profits for shareholders of the medical system. This is a form of institutionalized control over biological bodies, legitimized by dominant scientific discourses, but far from being the only ones, because true science is controversy.

Viktor Frankl, survivor of the camps and creator of logotherapy, wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946): “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lie our growth and our freedom.” This space is precisely that of presence. Freedom is never given to us from outside; it is conquered through the risks we take to gain it, regardless of the political context. Even in the most dictatorial systems, there exist margins of inner freedom. Conversely, in the most liberal democracies, normative control can be very strong.

Individual emancipation as political act

Working on oneself is not narcissistic withdrawal; it constitutes a fundamental political act. When a person works on their presence, they modify their way of positioning themselves in intimate and social space. This displacement moves those around them, whether they are aware of it or not. The movement of one benefits the other, even if they have not done this work, because the balance of the relational system is modified. This is the collective dimension of individual emancipation.

Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), showed how individuals develop “tactics” to resist the “strategies” of power. These daily micro-resistances, these ways of “poaching” in the imposed order, constitute so many spaces of freedom. Presence to oneself participates in these tactics: it allows one not to be entirely governed, to maintain a zone of indeterminacy in the face of norms. But it is an active approach, and socially risky.

Personal philosophical reflection on the unconscious controls that inhabit us is always beneficial and constructive, even if it can lead to isolation, even in the face of judgment or stigmatization; it also builds other bonds, other solidarities of resistance. As Étienne de La Boétie wrote in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1576), we are most often complicit in our own enslavement. Recognizing this complicity is not overwhelming oneself with guilt, but opening the possibility for dissubjection. For control, always and without exception, is a culture of death. Presence, on the other hand, opens a path toward life, not the biological survival promoted by biopolitics, but life as the power to act and create, as the capacity for individual and collective transformation. Even alone, one changes the world.