Dork Zabunyan is a professor of film studies at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. Among his publications : Les Cinémas by Gilles Deleuze (Bayard, 2011), L'Insistance des luttes - Images, soulèvements, contre-révolutions (De l'incidence éditeur, 2016), or Foucault at the Movies (Columbia University Press, 2018) with Patrice Maniglier. He has also produced with Laurent Jeanpierre a book of interviews with Jacques Rancière, La Méthode de l'égalité (Bayard, 2012).
He dialogues with Alain Berland on his latest essay, Fictions de Trump - Puissances des images et exercices du pouvoir (Le Point du Jour), which explores the function of images in the exercise of power today, the stories they tell and the discourses they condition.
If Trump rehabilitates the figure of the "political monster", born at the end of the 18th century in France, it renews
also the strategies of "eroticization of power" defined by Michel Foucault, as Silvio Berlusconi, for example, had done at the beginning of the 2000s. Two questions run through this essay: what is this strange love for the power, conveyed by the images of an authoritarian leader, to whom adhere individuals who have no interest in voting for him? What counterfeiters, real or imagined, are likely to mobilize the powers of the media images to evade this power, or even to thwart it?
With the support of Société Générale.
Photo credit: Delphine Tomaselli
