In his New Year’s message for 2022, Macron wished for a better world for the coming year: ‘2022 can be the year of the end of the pandemic, I want to believe it with you; the year where we can see the light at the end of the tunnel’ (Élysée 2021), before declaring in March, barely two months later: ‘The war in Europe is no longer that of history books, it is here, under our noses’ (Élysée 2022). The dichotomy of political affects into hope and fear plays directly to the liberal dream put together by Macron. His is the party of hope, the party of an open society, pro-European, globalist, based on free markets and rewarding merit. It is portrayed as the answer to the fear-driven, nationalist, Eurosceptic ideology of the far right that is driven by cronyism, nepotism and corruption. This hope/ fear dichotomy obfuscates the interplay between those two emotions, that there is no hope without fear or fear without hope, and that basing a political programme on hope has the potential for dramatic disillusionment in the case where those hopes are shattered by the unfolding of events. By introducing the concept of hope as an affect, as an emotion which drives action, and its relation to fear, the first part of this chapter will show that understanding Spinoza and Nietzsche on the concept will go a long way to highlight some of its pitfalls. We will then see how hope was deployed, by Macron, to achieve his political aims.

Hope as affect

In his Ethics, Spinoza defines hope as ‘an inconstant pleasure, arising from the idea of something past or future, whereof we to a certain extent doubt the issue’ (2003). Hope is a pleasure, something we take comfort and derive a psychological good from. Hope is also about things that are outside of our control: it is an affect of the lack of power to influence the outcome of events. It is, ultimately, an emotion of impotence. But it is also a good for Spinoza, in that we derive pleasure from the reassurance that hope offers us about precisely those events over which we have no control over.