The big bulldog shark measures up to 3.40 m. It weighs more than 200 kg. Nothing very reassuring. A compact, silent, viscous mass that slides into the water without warning…
However, a recent study devoted to these sharks, conducted in particular by the University of Exeter and published in the journal Animal Behaviour, shakes the well-established representation we make of these predators.
For six years, researchers have observed nearly 200 of these sharks in a Fiji marine reserve. They learned to recognize them, to distinguish them from each other, to note their presence, their interactions.
I can’t help but hear Charles Tisseyre articulate in my head, as in his show, Discovery, a very sonorous « fas-ci-naaant« .
But let’s go back to our sharks.
This study reveals a striking gap between the myth of the solitary predator – like the Jaws great white shark – and actually much more social existences. Enough to disturb our usual representations, and perhaps even the way we believe we recognize violence.
The figure of the shark represents in our societies a shadow of our own fears. She informs less about him than about us. In fact, it acts more like a screen on which we project what we fear without naming it.
There is an ancient, almost abstract fear, to which we give a body. Simple, readable threats, which power uses to order the world and justify its grip. On the one hand, the good ones. On the other, the bad guys.
The Secret Agent, the beautiful film by Kleber Mendonça Filho about the memory of dictatorship and political violence in Brazil, does not summon Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s classic, for nothing. Jaws recalls what, in our social relationships, perhaps creates the most anxiety and fear: the figure of the relentless predator.
Another classic version is found at Hobbes. His formula is known: « man is a wolf for man ». It presupposes a world where everyone fears the other, where the threat of conflict is constant – where insecurity is not an accident, but an almost natural state – and where only a strong power, that of a quasi-tyrant named Leviathan, can contain this violence.
The Leviathan is not content to respond to fear: it depends on it. It is, therefore, the organizer. It is a power that needs predators to make its own power legitimate and necessary. He needs sharp figures, recognizable threats, enemies at the height of anguish, even if it means simplifying them, or even making them from scratch. By dint of reducing the world to crude silhouettes, he comes to impose a truncated reading of reality, by sweeping complexity and reflection under the carpet in favor of a cult of action for action.
Creating what we claim to denounce – fear, violence – brings us back to a mode of government of which Washington now offers the sad example. A striking example to say the least, so to speak.
However, no more wolves than sharks correspond to this image. They live in groups, cooperate, raise their young. The « lone wolf » exists, but remains an exception. Like the shark in the movie Les dents de la mer, it is not the norm.
In a promotional campaign for his new book, Combat toujours perdant, writer Michel Houellebecq, a figure loved by the French right, criticizes Hobbes’ formula: « I know Hobbes’ formula, but Hobbes knew nothing about wolves. Wolves are not wolves for wolves. Their species is very supportive, and well organized. «
And Houellebecq to add that « wolves, for example, have a pay-as-you-go pension system »…
The image is simplistic, caricatured, but it at least reminds us that we willingly project on the animal schemes that first say something about ourselves: a way of distributing the roles, of designating who threatens and who protects, of affirming who must be contained and who can govern. As in the fables of La Fontaine. Short stories to structure long fears.
What we have long taken for a brutal and desocialized nature in some animals is a simplification, even a projection. The border between savagery and society is blurring. The very figures that we mobilize to think about violence and loneliness, such as the wolf and the shark, turn out to be engaged in sustained, complex relationships.
Violence exists. No one suggests throwing themselves into the wolf’s mouth or ending up as a shark snack. But behind the largely fabulated figures of solitary predators, there are relationships, proximity, forms of shared life.
While we project supposedly natural violence on other living, we are able, for our part, to produce it on a completely different scale, even in these landscapes of oil fields that burn under the bombs, with their plumes of toxic smoke that rise in a sky that looks like hell.
« Of all the animals of creation, man is the only one who drinks without thirst, who eats without being hungry and who speaks without having anything to say, » said John Steinbeck. He could have added that the human, this funny bird, is the only one to dirty his nest to the point of making his life increasingly impossible.
By dint of feeding fables populated by wolves and sharks, we ended up behaving like these threatening figures that we ourselves made, as if to better convince ourselves of their yet fabulous reality and dispense with looking at what made them so present.
Hobbes remains this great thinker of the conservatives. He has sustainably structured an imaginary where conflict and violence underlie order. Maybe it’s time to go elsewhere to see what could better make life in the grip of happiness. Maybe it’s time to look at what connects rather than what separates.
source : Le devoir
