French Literature Reviews - 2026

Y. Citton, Mythocratie. Storytelling et imaginaire de gauche
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas

Review published in Acta Fabula: "What Stories Can Do" by Florence Botello.

Yves Citton, Mythocratie. Storytelling et imaginaire de gauche

Paris: Éditions Amsterdam (Distribution: Les Belles Lettres), 2010, 221 p.

• ISBN: 978-2-35480-067-3
• Price: €17

Excerpts in the Fabula Workshop:

• The general introduction: “Soft Power” and Scripting
• An "Illustrative Interlude": Scripting from Above
• A "Literary Interlude": From Interrupted Myth to Work-in-Progress Epic

A review of this work can be read on the website viedesidees.fr: "What Stories Does the Left Need?", by D. Bougnoux.

Y. Citton is also the author of The Future of the Humanities: Knowledge Economy or Cultures of Interpretation?, Reading, Interpreting, Actualizing: What Are Literary Studies For? (excerpts from both of these works are reproduced in Fabula's Literary Theory Workshop), and The Flip Side of Freedom: The Invention of a Spinozist Imaginary in Enlightenment France.

Publisher's Overview:

According to a prevailing narrative, democracy has been corrupted by an insidious malady, transformed into a somnambulistic regime by the omnipresence of stories and myths complacently peddled by soporific media. Once the "power of the people," it has purportedly become the reign of the fable: a mythocracy. To move beyond powerless denunciations, we must turn the problem on its head. While it is necessary to analyze the "soft power" that directs our behavior within mass-media societies, condemning its operations matters less than learning to harness them as instruments of emancipation. Foremost among these instruments is myth itself: we must understand and leverage the (emancipatory) power of narrative—that is, mythocracy. This first entails developing a theory of (soft) power—the foundations of which are sketched in two chapters of this work, drawing inspiration from Spinoza, Tarde, and Foucault. Second, it requires defining a very specific dimension of human practices: a power of scripting through which our narratives and gestures condition the free behavior of others by embedding them in a narrative framework. Finally, it leads to the formulation of a reshaped political imaginary that defines new tasks, new modes of intervention, and new styles of speech.

Standing at the crossroads of political philosophy, anthropology, and literary theory, this book marshals a myriad of mythocrats, from Aeschylus to Wu Ming, via Diderot and Sun Ra. It is written for all those who today feel the need for a major shift to the left—while recognizing that "the left" remains, more than ever, to be reinvented.

The Author: Yves Citton is a professor of literature at the University of Grenoble 3 Stendhal and a member of the UMR LIRE (CNRS 5611). He taught in the USA for 12 years and designed the Indisciplinary Studies program at Sciences Po Paris.

He has published with Éditions Amsterdam Reading, Interpreting, Actualizing: What Are Literary Studies For? (2007), and The Flip Side of Freedom: The Invention of a Spinozist Imaginary in Enlightenment France (2006). He has also published Portrait of the Economist as a Physiocrat (L'Harmattan, 2001) and Impotences (Aubier, 1994). He co-edited Spinoza and the Social Sciences (Amsterdam, 2008, with Frédéric Lordon) and The Literary Frontiers of Economics (Desjonquères, 2008, with Martial Poirson).

He is a member of the editorial board of the journals Multitudes and Dix-huitième siècle, and regularly contributes to the Revue Internationale des Livres et des Idées.

Questions raised by the book:

Are we transitioning from a democratic regime to a "mythocracy," in which our collective future is shaped not by the people (the demos) but by myths (complacently disseminated by soporific media)? Is our life within "societies of control" truly governed by the stories told to mystify us (following the French vulgate of Storytelling)? How can we understand the "soft power" mobilized by mass media to direct our conduct? How can we redirect the operations of mythocracy to unearth instruments of emancipation? What would a new cartography of the political field look like if it were indexed to the social distribution of the inherent powers of narration?

This book attempts to answer these questions in the form of a brief essay which, while striving to be rigorous enough to capture the attention of specialists (in political thought, communication, movement sociology, and literary studies), aims above all to present cutting-edge issues to an audience extending far beyond the narrow confines of the academic world.

Book Structure:

The argument unfolds across four approaches succeeding one another in four stages.

1° It begins by synthesizing the new imaginary of power, which treats the circulation of flows of desires and beliefs as the very substance of power. Drawing on a cluster of contemporary thinkers inspired by Spinoza and Gabriel Tarde (Foucault, Negri, Latour, Lazzarato, Bove, Lordon), the first two chapters methodically yet synthetically and accessibly construct a model of power that outlines its substance (flows of beliefs and desires), its source (the potency of the bodies and minds of the multitude), its springs (the capture of attention), its dynamics (conflictuality channeled through spectacularization strategies), its management (through institutional channeling mechanisms), as well as its (more mysterious) capacity for self-transcendence. These first two chapters depict "power" as the result of an "ascending" (or "constituent") movement that transforms the potency of the multitude into political institutions whose authority subsequently "trickles down" onto each of us. They also offer an introduction to the forms of "soft power" that characterize the most common operations of this power (political, economic, media-driven) in our wealthy and relatively free countries.

2° In the second stage, the work asks "what a narrative can do" within the strategies of capture and channeling that structure the life of power. Chapter 3 provides the occasion for an (oblique) debate with the main theses of Christian Salmon's best-selling book on the resources of storytelling—resources that have certainly been hijacked by reactionary ideologies, but which can equally be reclaimed for emancipatory politics. Whereas Christian Salmon expertly highlights the dangers and impostures of a mythocracy that seeks to govern the behavior of voters, consumers, and employees through deceptive "stories," this book sheds light on the other side of Anglo-Saxon reflections on storytelling: an empowering dimension that makes the narrative structure the very form of all thought regarding action. Here, the literary theory of narration and fictionality is invoked to move beyond common-sense clichés about "what a narrative can do."

3° At the crossroads of narrative practices and power apparatuses, this brief essay primarily seeks to define a very specific type of activity: scripting, a term defined much more broadly than its cinematic connotations imply. "Scripting" refers to the fact that we never tell ourselves (or others) a story without projecting ourselves into a specific sequence of actions. To recount a past event or a simple dream, to stage a story, to articulate certain representations of actions according to specific sequences—all of this is an effort to guide the conduct of the listener, an attempt to script their future behavior. The phenomenon and mechanisms of scripting are defined and discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, in the middle of which is inserted, by way of recreation, an "Illustrative Interlude" that elevates the famous manipulation episode described by Diderot around Madame de la Pommeraye in Jacques the Fatalist into a paradigm of scripting. The essay's central hypothesis is that this power of scripting—as exercised on the evening news or in advertising, as well as in our everyday conversations—determines election results, stock market frenzies, surges in racism, contagious waves of indignation, or the collective invention of alternative possible worlds. Despite its modest size (under 200 pages), the work attempts to chart the general contours of this scripting power and suggest emancipatory uses for it.

4° Finally, a concluding section examines how this reflection on power in general, and the power of scripting in particular, can contribute to reconfiguring a leftist imaginary. A "Literary Interlude" reflects on the literary forms that a "left-wing" scripting might adopt, raising the intertwined questions of the type of "community" conceivable within such a leftist imaginary, and the type of narrative forms capable of giving it substance, drawing inspiration from the collective of Italian writer-intellectuals known as Wu Ming to pave the way for multiple emergent works-in-progress epics.

A final chapter outlines several adjustments and proposals aimed at defining a new cartography of the political field based on our conception of the power of scripting. The three preceding points are indeed sufficient to sketch the broad outlines of a certain stance of enunciation which, just as much as questions of content, characterizes a "left" that must be (re)invented against the pathetic dismay of current mainstream left-wing political parties.

To be on the left, therefore, means acting from a certain imaginary of power that the preceding chapters have sought to establish and which can be summarized by the following principles:

• (a) the vitality of political processes must be located in the ascending phase (the "constituent" phase) of the multitude's "potency" turning into institutional "power"—whereas a right-wing imaginary traditionally emphasizes the need to respect the authority that "trickles down" onto us;
• (b) the power to tell the new stories that will improve our shared future emerges from each of us, from our forms of life, desires, and daily resistances—whereas a right-wing imaginary (shared by a good portion of the statist left) tends to disqualify this shared power of storytelling in the name of a technocratic scientism;
• (c) if the myths nourishing our dominant mythocracy offer only a pale reflection of this shared storytelling power, it is because we must radically restructure the channels distributing the scripting power that ensures the circulation of stories among us; consequently, inequalities in access to and use of the power of scripting must be brought to the forefront of struggles claiming to be of "the left"—whereas right-wing policies systematically tend to obscure (under the guise of market forces and public "demand") or deny (under the guise of individualist free will) the impact of scripting power on our "freedoms."

Between Literature and Politics, from Aeschylus to Sun Ra:

Rather than through abstract theories, the final chapter maps out this project for a new leftist imaginary through a series of stories—the Tale of the Clumsy Fairy, a short history of left-wing gesturality, and the myth of the virtual everyman. This is driven not only by an (assumed) concern for "popularization," but also by a desire to explore the boundaries of what can already be "spoken" or "narrated" before it can truly be "thought" rigorously.

Although presented primarily as an essay in political philosophy, the book continually nourishes its reflection with abundant literary and artistic material. In addition to its constant return to the episode of Madame de La Pommeraye from Diderot's novel, it relies on precise references to Aeschylus's Eumenides, the foundational tragedy of a specific imaginary of democratic institutions.

It also places itself under the auspices of a quotation from jazz musician Sun Ra, featured as an epigraph and revisited and enriched from chapter to chapter: "I tell people they've tried everything else, but they haven't tried mythocracy yet. They've had democracy, theocracy. Mythocracy is what you've never become of what you should be." Sun Ra and his Arkestra illustrated a particular way of "telling oneself stories"—in this case, the fable of an extraterrestrial origin (the musician claimed to come from the planet Saturn)—in order to produce very real effects in energizing our creative, artistic, and political potentials.

This essay is thus addressed to all those who believe that the reinvention of "the left" must be situated at the intersection of the Arts and Politics—and that this reinvention is absolutely vital to the very survival of the human species.

Detailed Table of Contents:

Introduction: "Soft Power" and Scripting . . . . . 11

Chapter I: Reshaping Our Imaginary of Power . . . . 19

• The dissolution of powers . . . . . . . .
• The economy of attention . . . . . . . .
• The economy of affects . . . . . . . . . .
• Pathways and publics . . . . . . . . . . .
• A world of unprecedented plasticity . . . . . . .

Chapter II: Modeling the Circulation of Power . . . . 37

• The circulation of flows of desires and beliefs . . . . .
• The percolation of potency into power . . . . . .
• Institutions as mediations with multiplier effects . . . . .
• Power as "meta-conduct" conditioning "free" conduct . . .
• Social life as a web of strategizations . . . . . .
• Verticality within immanence . . . . . . . .

Chapter III: The Activity of Scripting . . . . . 65

• The omnipresence of (right-wing) narratives . . . . . .
• Nature and power of narratives . . . . . . . .
• Reconfiguration and re-concatenation . . . . . .
• Dangers of tertiary retentions and virtues of props . . . . .
• From narration to scripting . . . . . . . .
• Myths as enchanting speech . . . . . . . .

Illustrative Interlude: Scripting from Above . . . . 91

Chapter IV: Attractors and Infrapolitics . . . . . 101

• Hooks and scripts . . . . . . . . . . .
• Re-enacting and reconfiguring scripts . . . . . . .
• Affective investments and value reprocessing . . . . . .
• Scripting from below and the power of fairness . . . . .
• Infrapolitical mythocracy . . . . . . . . .

Chapter 5: New Demands for Equality . . . . . 135

• Level inequalities and scripting training . . . . . .
• Structural inequalities and symbolic viscosities . . . . .
• Regulations and disintermediations? . . . . . .
• Orchestrating scriptings from below . . . . . .

Literary Interlude: From Interrupted Myth to Work-in-Progress Epic . . . 159

Chapter VI: Renewing the Leftist Imaginary . . . . 171

• Short tale of the clumsy fairy . . . . . . .
• Interrupting the myth of Growth-is-Queen . . . . . .
• Short history of left-wing gesturality . . . . . .
• Sun Ra and the mythocracy of the virtual everyman . . . .
• Clumsiness and left-handedness . . . . . . .
• When is the turn toward Saturn? . . . . . . .

Bibliographical References . . . . . . . 203

Index . . . . . . . . . . . 213

The concept of mythocracy addresses the shift from traditional democratic processes to a regime where collective behavior is shaped by media-driven narratives. By situating the work at the intersection of political philosophy, anthropology, and literary theory, the author engages with the intellectual tradition of thinkers such as Spinoza, Gabriel Tarde, and Michel Foucault. The text explores how soft power functions through the management of desires and beliefs, proposing that storytelling mechanisms can be analyzed as instruments of political intervention.

The analysis focuses on the practice of scripting, defined as the way narratives and gestures condition human behavior by embedding actions within a structured framework. The book examines the potential of narrative structures to serve as instruments of emancipation. Readers interested in the intersection of contemporary media studies, political thought, and the sociology of movements may find this exploration of narrative power and its social distribution relevant.