Writing — Mots & Pouvoir

Decoding the world through language: politics, philosophy and literature.

As a computational linguist, I am as interested in how machines process language as in how language shapes power.

Mots & Pouvoir (“Words & Power”) is a French-language publication I write on Substack. It asks what words do to people: how speeches build authority, what languages say about societies, and what African thought brings to these questions.

This writing is the counterpart of my technical work. When I train a model to classify speech or to read inscriptions, the question of what language does is never far away.

Selected essays (in French)

• 12 Mar. 2026How dictators choose their wordsLanguage is never innocent: from Hitler to today's military juntas in Africa, the rhetorical architecture used to subdue, seduce and silence. Most read
• 15 June 2026Notes from Underground: what Dostoevsky forces us to seeRereading the first great existentialist novel, written eighty years before Sartre: when lucidity, instead of freeing, paralyses.
• 17 July 2026The gentle tyranny of a word: a political genealogy of “resilience”How a concept from materials physics became an injunction addressed to the dominated, and a tool of depoliticisation.
• 17 Mar. 2026Camus, the absurd and the refusal to obey ideologiesIn a century when everyone picked a side, Camus refused: no abstract idea justifies sacrificing a living human being.