Breaking the Hold:THE POWER OF THE FEMININE and the future of democracy
CORINE PELLUCHON
PAYOT & rivages, 208 pages, 2025
***Spanish and German rights granted***
Longlisted for the Prix Renaudot 2025 in Non Fiction
√ A call to resist and defend our democracies
√ An inspiring feminist political philosophy
√ A major contemporary philosopher’ s take on the rise of the far right around the world
The steady rise of far-right parties in Europe and around the world, their aggressive rhetoric, the nationalist and xenophobic content of their platforms are all eroding democracy. In response to the urgency of our times, Corine Pelluchon follows in the footsteps of eminent philosophers from Leo Löwenthal and Theodor W. Adorno to Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt, who have sought to explain why people become susceptible to fascism.
In Democracy Unchained or the Power of the Feminine, Pelluchon argues that while it is necessary to identify autocrats and to insist on the safeguards and moral dispositions that enable democracy to be preserved, it is just as crucial to understand the psychological mechanisms that drive individuals to support extreme-right movements. Those who suffer from narcissistic wounds and a need for validation can be vulnerable to emprise, a term borrowed from the psychology of abusive relationships meaning “to have a hold over” or “to unduly influence.” When applied to politics, its three phases—seduction, manipulation, and domination—can explain how people are drawn into extreme positions like fascism, which encourages people to vent their feelings of powerlessness by unloading their aggression onto certain groups.
Pelluchon proposes that it’s exactly at this moment that the power of the feminine in both women and men stands in opposition to force and the obsession to control. The power of the feminine bears witness to the love of a world that makes it possible to welcome new beings and spreads a spirit of acceptance without which a humanistic and ecologic project cannot prevail.
Building on the ethical framework developed in her previous work, Pelluchon weaves in the themes dear to her philosophical vision—corporeality, vulnerability, our dependence on others and on nature—to help us navigate our troubled times.
Corine Pelluchon is a philosopher and professor at Gustave Eiffel University. She is the author of some twenty books, in which she develops a philosophy of corporeality that emphasizes our vulnerability and dependence on nature, the elements, and other living beings. In 2020, she was awarded Germany’s Günther Anders Prize for Critical Thinking for her body of work. Her recent publications include L’être et la mer (PUF, 2024), L’espérance, ou la traversée de l’impossible (Rivages, 2023), Paul Ricœur, philosophe de la reconstruction: Soin, attestation, justice (PUF, 2022), and translated in English, Nourishment: A Philosophy of the Political Body (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Leo Strauss and the Crisis of Rationalism: Another Reason, Another Enlightenment (State University of New York Press, 2015).