Pascal Bruckner is an acclaimed essayist and novelist, whose Bitter Moon was made into a film by Roman Polanski.

Awarded the prestigious Académie Française Prix 2000 and Medici Prize 1995 for Essays

"Everyone is guilty but me." - C©line. In his science fiction novel THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, Richard Matheson offered a striking metaphor of the insignificant individual struck by his smallness. Compared to the vastness of the world and the multitude of other beings, we are all pygmies crushed by how gigantic the world has become. We are all shrinking men: On the deck of a motorboat, a man is sunning himself. Suddenly, he's splashed by a curtain of spray, sprinkled with droplets that leave his skin with a pleasant tingling feeling. He towels himself off without giving it much thought. He soon notices that he is a couple of inches shorter. His doctor conducts a thorough examination, finds nothing out of the ordinary, and admits that he has no explanation. The man goes on getting smaller every day. The people around him seem to grow; his wife, who used to come up to just above his shoulder, is now a head taller than he is. She soon leaves this runty little husband. He takes up with a dwarf in the circus, with whom he shares his last human passion before she, too, transforms into a giantess. He keeps on shrinking and reaches the size of a doll, then a tin soldier, until he finds himself confronted by his own cat ; an adorable kitty who has become a tiger with immense eyes and who stretches her paw at him, sharp-edged talons extended. Later, having taken refuge in the cellar, he faces a monstrous spider. . . The "global village" is only the sum of the constraints that subject everyone to the same externality from which we strive to protect ourselves ; for want of being able to master it. This interdependence of humanity, and the fact that remote acts have incalculable repercussions for us, are suffocating. The more the media, trade, and exchanges bring continents and cultures closer together, the more overpowering becomes the pressure of all upon each; we seem to have been dispossessed of ourselves by a chain of forces over which we have no influence. The planet has contracted so much that the distances that used to separate us from our peers have been reduced to negligibility. The net has closed in, causing a sense of claustrophobia and almost of incarceration. Demographic explosions, mass migrations, ecological catastrophes, you would think that human beings were falling all over each other. And what was the end of Communism but the irruption, on the international scene, of the innumerable? Human tribes are legion and all of them, delivered from the totalitarian yoke, aspire to recognition. But no one can remember their names! Thus the voiceless plea that each one, on a globe that is full as an egg, raises to heaven: Deliver us from the others (which should be understood as: Deliver me from myself)! I call 'innocence' the disease of individualism; it consists in trying to escape the consequences of our own acts, attempting to enjoy the advantages of liberty without suffering any of the disadvantages...

Introduction: The Incredible Shrinking Man 5 PART I ; IS BABYHOOD MAN's FUTURE? 15 1. The Victory of the Individual, or Crowning the King of Dust 17 Be yourself ; that is, guilty, 19. In the dock,

Introduction: The Incredible Shrinking Man 5 PART I ; IS BABYHOOD MAN's FUTURE? 15 1. The Victory of the Individual, or Crowning the King of Dust 17 Be yourself ; that is, guilty, 19. In the dock, 25. A Pyrrhic victory, 28. All equal, all enemies, 32. The clone syndrome, 36. Tired of being ourselves, 40. 2. Re-Enchanting the World 47 Irrefutable abundance, 48. Perpetual Easter, 52. Sublime stupidities, 55. Everything, and right away!, 60. Happiness is a good inheritance, 61. Insatiable demand, 64. Life is a party, 67. A sedative for the eyes, 70. Universal consolation, 73. The routine as a route to re-enchantment, 76. Consumers are not the same as citizens, 79. The puerile land of plenty, 84. 3. Tiny Little Grownups 89 The good savage in residence, 90. His Majesty The Baby, 94 From child-citizen to citizen-child, 97. It's so hard being an adult, 101. Too much of Toyland, 106. The seduction of kitsch, 108. Be yourself, 111. I deserve it, 113. PART II ; A THIRST FOR PERSECUTION 121 4. Joining the Elect, by Suffering 123 The marketing of affliction, 124. We are all cursed, 127. Don;¢t judge me! 135. Toward a holy family of victims? 139. A thirst for persecution, 146. Comfort in defeat, 150. 5. The New War of Secession (between Men and Women) 159 From Hitler to Playboy, 160. Female dictatorship, 161. Freedom, equality, irresponsibility, 165. My roots, my ghetto, 172. Forgetting where you come from, 177. Women as flowers, and the pornocrats, 181. Eros bound, 185. Curing the heart of itself, 191. Being seductive, or being frank, 197. Complicity or deafness, 201. PART III ; VICTIMIST COMPETITION 213 6. The Innocence of the Torturer (The victim, in Serb propaganda) 215 A fundamental error, 216. The exaltation of defeat, 219. Genocide as a rhetorical device, 223. A false assimilation, 227. The Jew as both competitor and role model, 228. Everyone is against the Serbs, 232. The right to revenge, 236. Thieves of distress, 241. Angelic killers, 243. 7. The Arbitrary Reign of the Heart (The misadventures of pity) 257     1) THE LAW OF FLEXIBLE FRATERNITY, 258.  Routine insults, 258. Pain: upping the ante, 261. The impotent image, 263. Intermitencies of the heart, 266. A big spoon, 270. Skimming or selecting, 271.     2) LOVING INDIGENCE, 274. The transcendence of the victim, 274.  The actor's pain, 279. A narcissistic commotion, 282. Sainthood without the hardship, 285.      3) EXTRANEOUS PEOPLE, 288.  The pact of tears, 288. Compassion as a form of contempt, 291. The menu approach, 295. Revising history, 297. Conclusion: A narrow door for revolt 307 The sense of indebtedness, 310. The chaos of misfortunes, 312. Inevitable disappointment, 315.