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  • Preface:Vous indignez-vous?
  • David Scott

Mais dans ce monde il y a des choses insupportables. Pour le voir, il faut bien regarder, chercher. Je dis aux jeunes : cherchez un peu, vous allez trouver. La pire des attitudes est l'indifférence, dire « je n'y peux rien, je me débrouille ». En vous comportant ainsi, vous perdez l'une des composantes essentielles qui fait l'humain. Une des composantes indispensables : la faculté d'indignation et l'engagement qui en est la conséquence.

—Stéphane Hessel, Indignez-vous!

In October 2010 a slender booklet of less than thirty pages was published in France and very quickly became something of a cause célèbre. Indignez-vous! was written by Stéphane Hessel, who at ninety-three years old felt he had some unvarnished truths about the state of our common humanity to pass on to a younger generation.1 The booklet's central preoccupation is succinctly captured in its title: Be Outraged!2 For Hessel, as the quote that constitutes my epigraph suggests, the most despicable attitude to which we can surrender ourselves is that of "indifference," the smug self-satisfaction in our relative well-being and the assumption that this well-being is unrelated—and invulnerable—to conditions of affliction and suffering elsewhere. To be indifferent, Hessel urges, is not merely to be socially blind or politically naive but to be morally impoverished; it is to lose an essential aspect of our humanity, namely, our [End Page vii] faculty of indignation. It is this capacity, in his view, that has to be at the generative, orienting center of our moral sense of ourselves. Now, what indignation entails, first of all, is not merely anger or annoyance, though obviously these are typically part of its range of affect. To feel indignation is to register something more profound than strong displeasure. It is to feel a sense of injustice. This is because, second, indignation depends upon the recognition that we are connected to something larger than our individual selves and therefore share something beyond our individual wants and needs. Indignation is constitutively relational. To feel indignation, then, is to suffer a wounding sense that something unworthy of our common humanity has been perpetrated upon us, that some we, in short, have been the victims of an outrage. But what is even more significant about indignation than its implicit sense of community—and this is what Hessel especially wants to draw our attention to—is the way in which it compels us to act. To be indignant is to be provoked. Indignation demands not just a private psychological response (though it wants this, too); it demands moral action.

Indeed, this booklet Indignez-vous! is a cri du coeur from a man whose life has been remarkable for its commitment to moral action. Hessel is a veteran of the French Resistance organized to repulse the Nazi occupation during the Second World War; he was part of the group that formed around General Charles de Gaulle—la France libre—in London in 1941. Arrested by the Gestapo while on a secret mission to France in July 1944, and interrogated under torture, he was dispatched to Buchenwald a month later (a few weeks before the liberation of Paris). This is his historical point de départ, the background against which he conceives his poetics of indignation: the defeat and humiliation of France at the hands of the Nazis. Since then of course, as he says, there have been other occasions that have rightly incited indignation—the colonial question, notably. But where today is our motive for indignation? Where do we draw the line between what is and what is not acceptable to us? What outrage will bestir us from our complacency and compel us to declare the present insupportable? These are the questions that Hessel addresses to the young:

Le motif de base de la Résistance était l'indignation. Nous, vétérans des mouvements de résistance et des forces combattantes de la France libre, nous appelons les jeunes générations à faire vivre, transmettre, l'héritage de la Résistance et ses idéaux. Nous leur disons : prenez le relais...

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