The Aesthetic Regime of Abuse

The term psychopolitics is no longer enough. It still names an important mutation of power: the fact that power no longer governs solely through coercion, discipline, or ideology, but also through affects, perception, anxiety, attention, and fear. Yet today the term feels too broad and, in a certain sense, too soft. What we are witnessing is not simply a politics that acts upon the psyche. It is something more specific: an aesthetic regime of abuse.

By this I mean a form of power in which humiliation, arbitrariness, intimidation, contradiction, and shock cease to be excesses of public discourse and become its very mode of appearance. Abuse is not, here, an individual pathology or a rhetorical accident. It is a logic internal to the regime itself: its sensory grammar, its way of producing centrality, obedience, and capture.

This is why the older categories now seem only partial. Domination implies a certain stability between command and obedience. Hegemony implies some capacity to articulate consent. Ideology implies a relatively coherent representation of the world. But this regime does not unify, stabilize, or organize a durable vision. It erupts, fragments, oversaturates, displaces. It does not require convinced subjects. It can work perfectly well with subjects who are tired, overstimulated, resentful, and disoriented.

What emerges, then, is less a dominant ideology than an operative aesthetics of power; less hegemony than a nervous occupation of the scene; less domination in the classical sense than an administration of subjective instability.

Within this framework, operations such as gaslighting, blame reversal, exemplary humiliation, or programmed contradiction should not be understood as borrowed psychological vocabulary or incidental analogies. They are mechanisms proper to the regime itself. Contemporary politics does not merely use these techniques. It increasingly functions through them.

Political gaslighting is not simply a matter of lying. It consists in denying what is plainly visible, rewriting in real time what was just said, and eroding trust in any shared standard of verification. It does not need to produce full belief. It only needs to weaken the subject’s capacity to judge.

Blame reversal turns the aggressor into the victim. The one who humiliates, insults, or destroys then reappears as persecuted, censored, attacked. Violence becomes opaque; the moral scene is scrambled.

Programmed contradiction is not incompetence. It is technique. One thing and its opposite are asserted in rapid succession, quickly enough to prevent any stable fixation of meaning. The result is not persuasion but fatigue.

Exemplary humiliation, meanwhile, does not simply destroy a specific target. It instructs. It warns. It distributes fear. It turns damage into a public pedagogy.

We are not, then, dealing with a politics that sometimes manipulates. We are dealing with a form of power whose proper mode of operation is manipulative. Its truth does not lie behind those tactics. It lies in them. It does not govern despite the disorganization it produces, but through it.

This also transforms the figure of leadership. The classical political leader still aspired to embody a worldview, an order, a promise. The contemporary figure looks more like the performer of an abuser: someone who must humiliate, interrupt, provoke, deny, and keep the scene under constant tension in order to sustain centrality. Its force lies not in argumentative coherence but in the capacity to generate a climate. It does not persuade; it disorients. It does not organize; it disrupts. It does not stabilize; it occupies.

Aggression becomes style. Arbitrariness becomes a sovereign gesture. Cruelty becomes a technique of presence.

This regime also produces a specific kind of subject. It does not produce citizens in any strong sense. It produces unstable, exhausted, hypervigilant subjectivities vulnerable to capture—subjects exposed to a continuous sequence of shocks, contradictions, and humiliations that weaken their capacity to process experience, sustain memory, and form judgment.

At least four figures emerge from this field: the disoriented subject, for whom reality becomes unstable; the excited subject, trapped in permanent reaction; the resentful subject, whose frustration is endlessly reactivated and redirected; and the dependent subject, who develops an ambivalent relation to the very instance that wounds him, oscillating between fear, fascination, and identification.

This is perhaps its deepest political effect. It does not merely degrade public language or erode institutional mediations. It produces a type of human being: saturated, resentful, dysregulated, trained to react before thinking, to identify before judging, to endure contradiction rather than contest it.

That is the core of the problem. Abuse no longer appears as an anomaly of the regime. It functions as its aesthetics.