Trump or Lecornu, preside or manage?

It is possible that in politics, as in the symbolic universes analyzed by anthropology, what matters is not so much the inner truth of a figure as the system of differences that gives it meaning. A politician is not just a person: it is also a mask. And a mask is never understood alone. In “The Way of the Masks,” Claude Lévi-Strauss shows that a mask, like a myth, is only intelligible through the transformations that connect it to other masks. There is not a first and stable form but games of inversions, displacements, permutations that allow the meaning to emerge. Such trait, exaggerated here, fades elsewhere. Such motif migrates from one figure to another. What one mask says, it always says from another mask.

This is how contemporary politics should perhaps be understood. No longer as a theater populated by individual characters, but as a series of masks that make sense in relation to each other. From this perspective, Lecornu could be read as the inversion of Trump. Not as his ideological opposite but as his symbolic inversion. However, one must not mechanically compare two institutional functions that do not have the same scale or scope. One presides over a global power; the other governs within a state apparatus. But it is precisely this gap that highlights their opposition: they each respond at their level to the same problem of shaping power.