La Dignité : Les debouts de l’utopie (Dignity, the stand-ups of Utopia) is the title chosen by Bernard Doray for his most recent book, and for him, dignity refers to the places of the psyche and of culture through which women and men affirm that they belong to the human world. Bernard Doray coordinated, when the Alliance Proposal Papers were drawn up in 2001, one of the four Papers produced by the School of Peace, "War and Genocide ... Restoring Humanity in Human Beings Faced with Extreme Situations".
In this recent work, the author, a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and anthropologist by training, summarizes many years of theoretical thinking nourished by his involvement in the field. He questions the history of Western thought on the concept of dignity from the angle of current issues, in particular that of the aspiration to a post-capitalist economy where dignity would be one of the basic values. Among the acting concepts of Western culture, he examines Freud’s discretion with regard to that of dignity. He also calls upon the social sciences around the subjects of poverty and dissidence. From the Chilean judge Juan Guzmán to Henri Alleg, the publisher of the Algerian daily "Alger Républicain", from Sub-commander Marcos to the Belarusian scientist Yuri Bandajevski, jailed for five years for his research on the influence of radioactive agents on the victims of Chernobyl, these are also the "bearers of dignity" contributing to this work, mostly on the basis of original interviews.
Profoundly interdisciplinary, rooted in the field of ethics, and including the angle of mental health, which is rarely taken into account for this type of research, the book opens up new perspectives for political projects, therapeutics, the analysis of work and the economy, and proposes a road to the humanism of our era.
416 pages, La Dispute éditeurs, Paris.
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