#MeOnlyForMyself: Un paradoxe de l’expérience de la solitude à l’ère des réseaux sociaux

This article takes as its starting point from a paradoxical phenomenon that can be observed since the rise of social media: sharing snapshot pictures of solitary activities and expressing the deep joy found in solitude. A paradox, as the publicity of joy in solitude annihilates the very possibility of solitude. The article analyzes this phenomenon using Arendt’s distinction between solitude and loneliness, linking it to Kierkegaard’s notion of despair. It suggests that the joy of solitude asserted in public is in fact an expression of the despair of loneliness, and that it reflects a tacit aspiration for togetherness. Marketed by the personal development industry as an art of how to be all-one with the universe, solitude in fact does not entail any capacity to build a stable world. Even the “self” in solitude that is presented in the perfect mise-en-scène in fact cannot overcome the equivocity of being some-one and no-one. The article reads this collective phenomenon as a symptom of the absence of a new form of an in-between in the twenty-first century, where we are connected to the whole world and to others more than in any previous phase of modern history, yet where we at the same time have never before been so worldless, thrown back to our wordless subjectivity, of being a “self” that we all want to develop, realize, and enjoy.