A lobster platter or a yellow vest, a candidate's suit or an American president's tweet – we either choose to be visible or we suffer from it, but we can hardly ever escape it. Whether stemming from a desire to see and to be seen or from a need to personally express ourselves, visibility is a tyranny that is deeply rooted within each of us, and whose tools are at our fingertips. This tyranny can be cruel when working to our disadvantage. But it can also be enjoyable when it results in the hard-fought designation, in the religious sense of the term, of an individual or a group. The cult of visibility produces a new relationship to authority, reality and truth, with its own pitfalls and perils. It transforms our imagination and our social interactions and, as a result, the status of the political class, which finds itself today more vulnerable than ever. It is important to both understand the significance of this injunction and to criticize it, in order to resist it perhaps a little, or at least to ward off some of its dangers …
