THE ERA OF TOXICITY: CIVILIZATION AND ITS NEW DISCONTENTS

Clotilde Leguil

(PUF, 240 pages, 2023)

Today, the word “toxic” seems to be on everyone’s lips. A romantic relationship turns into manipulation and control? Toxic. A boss demanding always more while questioning the work accomplished? Toxic. A friend or relative becoming too invasive and interfering in every corner of our life? Toxic.

Toxic seems to capture the zeitgeist of our time. This is what philosopher and psychoanalyst Clotilde Leguil explores in this original essay as she retraces the semantic shifts of the word, for what is said to be toxic in the twentieth-first century is not what was said to be toxic in the previous ones. The field of what we call toxic today extends beyond the sphere of addictions and is no longer restricted to the world of objects or products whose effect was said to be toxic. The toxic that has now seeped into discourses, relationships, and sexual life designates a substance of a new kind—a psychological poison that has spread to masculinity, to parents, to love, to management, to progress, and to the overexploitation of the Earth’s resources.

 Inspired by Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontent, and nourished by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s studies, Leguil also tracks the toxic in literature and films—Robert Musil’s Young Törless, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and filmmaker David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. In The Era of Toxicity, she brilliantly illuminates the toxic as a sign and symptom of a new malaise of civilization.

Clotilde Leguil is a philosopher and psychoanalyst, professor in the psychoanalysis department at the University of Paris 8 and member of the École de la Cause freudienne. Since her publication Les amoureuses: voyage au bout de la féminité (Seuil, 2009), she has been exploring the shadowy areas of intimate experience. Her previous work, Céder n’est pas consentir: une approche clinique politique du consentement, was published by PUF in 2021.