TenouaInterview26 May 2026
“Projection” with Eva Illouz: the inner removal
50 min
For the second episode of her series “Projection”, Delphine Horvilleur reverses the roles: she is the one asking. Facing her, the woman she calls “a true pillar of reflection, and sometimes of consolation”: sociologist Eva Illouz, with images as prompts: how October 7 rearranged the furniture of her thought, a left she was orphaned by, the crisis of language around the word Zionism, and what loving one’s people can mean. In French.
“There is something that haunts me personally. I ask myself: am I the same person I was two and a half years ago, before October 7? When I look at myself in the mirror, am I the same?”
“In the Bible, when there is sovereignty, the prophet must criticize the king. The prophet is the one who addresses criticism to the king. But when the people is in exile, then he must be in nehama, in the comforting of his own.”
“We are living through a crisis of language. […] The quintessence of this misunderstanding, of what I would call a blurring of meaning, is the word Zionism. Plenty of people use it in one sense or in the opposite one. For some it is a badge of honour; for others, an insult of honour.”
“Loving one’s people is not always easy. Sometimes our people is not very lovable.”
“For so long, Jews were identified with the feminine. […] In the current context, it is troubling to see that Jews have, as it were, changed sex or changed gender: the Jew is now associated with the virile, with the Israeli soldier, with muscles.”
The session
The principle of “Projection”: images as triggers. A woman at a mirror opens the conversation: are we the same person as before October 7? Eva Illouz answers with the image that gives the episode its angle: a complete rearrangement of the furniture of her thought, a progressive left turned uncanny, the feeling of being orphaned. Then her genealogy of virtuous hatred (the “powerism” of the social sciences, Israel erected as the paradigm of evil), the subversion of words (the worm eating the apple from within, the Soviet weldings of language), the image Delphine Horvilleur chose for her, a Superman caught in a vise (the year the Israel Prize was cancelled by a minister while a Rotterdam conference disinvited her for her Israeli career), the 1963 Scholem-Arendt exchange on love of the Jewish people, of which she says she has moved to Scholem’s side, the accusations of treason (whose weight since Rabin’s assassination Delphine Horvilleur recalls), and her “auto-immune disease”: a multiply traumatized people no longer distinguishing its healthy cells from its enemies. To close, a spyglass: fight so the left wakes up, “because a left that disqualifies itself leaves us naked”.