Originally posted at The Utopian.
My, what a year it’s been, so far. I spent the first week of it happily writing an overdue article on philosophical debates about avian vocalization—birdsong—from Aristotle to Kant. I spent the second week engaged in near-constant polemics and editorializing about the place of free speech in a just society. My life has been entirely overtaken by debates about what is at stake in the wake of last week’s attacks. I have tried to pull out, to get back to a normal sleeping schedule, to return to beautiful things. But I can’t. It has simply been too severe a bouleversement. It is a true crisis. Life, and history, occasionally throw these our way.
In case you missed it: some days ago in Paris a pair of assassins targeted and murdered the cartoonists associated with a weekly satirical magazine that had offended them with its contributions to the low art of caricature. Two days later, an ally of the assassins murdered four more people. What was their offense? They were Jewish, and they were moreover guilty by association with the cartoonists. What was the nature of this association? They happily lived and paid taxes in the same country that had hosted Charlie Hebdo.
In the days that followed, two trends emerged. The state cynically co-opted the attacks, and used it to promote “national unity,” which in fact means increased Islamophobia and deprivation of basic rights to privacy and freedom of expression. Parallel to this a number of commentators sought effectively to excuse the attacks, or to downplay the atrocity of them. These people came from all points on the political spectrum, and all agreed that, “while this act of violence was terrible and must be condemned in the strongest of terms” (etc.), it is not OK to say offensive things against the cherished beliefs of other people.
These statements were generally variations on the “Sad news, but…” formula. Jacob Canfield at the Hooded Utilitarian left out the but,” yet implied it with the stark juxtaposition of two structurally similar sentences: “Nobody should have been killed over those cartoons. Fuck those cartoons.” At least two young Marxists, whom I will not link here, took to social media to try out their new teeth, tweeting simply: “Fuck Charlie Hebdo.” Starting out from rather different first principles, Bob Donohue of the Catholic League quickly followed suit with similar, if more family-friendly, sentiments. Then various representatives of the Russian Orthodox church chimed in, as well as scattered evangelicals. Most recently, Pope Francis joined the chorus with this lighthearted reflection: “If my good friend Dr. Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch in the nose.”
I’ve learned over the past few days that different people hear the illocutionary force—or perlocutionary, whatever; my Austin is rusty—of certain statements very differently. In the category of statements we are considering, the interpretation depends much on the moral weight of the deed that follows the “but.” Think, for example, of the horrible maneuver made by defenders of the police when they add to their denunciation of police brutality observations like: “…but Eric Garner was breaking the law.” We rightly interpret this, it seems to me, as a partial justification of what the police did, no matter how loudly the defenders of the police also protest that “of course brutality is always indefensible” (etc.). For me the reselling of cigarettes is a completely neutral undertaking, and for this reason the “…but he was doing something illegal” clause has no force whatsoever in relation to the vastly more important question of police brutality. I hear the “but” there and it sets off a loud warning about the other commitments of the person who deploys it. I’m hearing similar-sounding sirens, now, too, as the “buts” fly in the wake of the Paris massacre.
I really don’t see how the Pope’s statement could be interpreted any other way than: “[Just as] if you make fun of my mom, you can rightly expect to get a punch in the nose, [so too, if you make fun of anyone’s religion, you can rightly expect to be assassinated by a right-wing death squad]”— which is all the brothers Kouachi were part of: not “the Muslim community” (as if there were such a unified and homogeneous thing), not the oppressed of the world who aren’t going to take it any more and who are rising up at long last. Just a right-wing death squad working in more or less open collusion with the National Frontto make life as miserable as possible for everyone in France in the coming years. And now the Pope, too, is on board with that.
I feel as if, one after the other, people in whom I had placed no small hope for helping to lead the world out of its present darkness turn out to be intent on dragging us deeper into it. I find myself on the opposite side of a divide from people with whom I continue to think I have political common cause. I have been consistently loud about the gross inhumanity of the Israeli massacre in Gaza, about the seriousness of France’s problem with xenophobia, about police brutality and the carceral complex as neo-slavery in the United States. I do not mean here to exaggerate my bona-fides, however. I have never been a good partisan, and if I can’t pinpoint a particular “Budapest, 1956” moment—a sudden awakening that leads to a break with the party—this is only because I have had several such moments. Before Paris, 2015, there was Donetsk, 2014, when a wave of self-styled progressives rose up to ask, with explicit or implicit reference to Vietnam, to Iraq, to the Monroe Doctrine: “Who are we to criticize?” And I thought: I don’t know who you are, but I certainly know who I am. I am not a representative of the government of the country in which I was born, I am an enemy of imperialism, and I am a supporter of peaceful people everywhere who just want to be left alone. Down with Putin.
Again and again, the same disappointment returns, and it always stems from a basic difference of understanding as to the role of state actors in the world, and as to the position that we, as analysts and activists, should be taking vis-à-vis state actors. The statist left tends to suppose that states, for better or worse, are where it’s at, that they are the proper targets of criticism and the best hope for future progress. Correlative to these commitments, they suppose that the United States, as the most powerful imperial state in the world, is the proper, even exclusively proper, target of criticism, even to the point of taking a quietist stance on gross abuses of power elsewhere in the world. This stance, in turn, results in an almost instinctive penchant for non-sequiturs. Putin murdering journalists again? Well, what about the US persecution of Chelsea Manning? Erdogan eliminating basic freedoms that had been hard won by the Kemalist revolution? Well, what about that Tea Party? A death squad carries out a hit on cartoonists in Paris? Well, what about those US drones in Pakistan? What the people who resort to this sort of deflection do not seem to realize is that in principle it could be used against anything anyone else might be talking about: school-board meetings, recycling, whatever. Drones trump everything. They are horrible: a gross exercise of blind and murderous violence.
We are but limited, mortal beings, and can only address one or two issues at a time. We can of course rightly bemoan the state cooptation of the Charlie Hebdo attack, and we can rightly ask why western governments care more about it than about massacres elsewhere in the world. But we are not states, you and I, and the fact that there are drones killing people in Pakistan does not mean that the assassinations in Paris do not merit a serious political analysis, any more than the drones should excuse us from our daily recycling duties.
I utterly reject the US State Department view of the threat of political Islamism to global security. However, in France and throughout Europe right now, there is a trend that is hard to ignore and that requires a special analysis of the role of Islamism in the regional context. As Juan Cole rightly noted, the likely goal of the Islamists in this case is to stoke Islamophobia in France, and so effectively to get the far right to help radicalize otherwise moderate French Muslims. The far right in turn is happily volunteering for this task. Sometimes the two tendencies come together in a single person: witness Dieudonné, whose child has Jean-Marie Le Pen as a godfather. As if on cue, following both his script and mine, Le Pen has just told the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaia Pravda that “this anarchist journal [Charlie Hebdo] was the direct enemy of our party, the National Front.” Le Pen’s reaction, we might speculate, is symptomatic of the black-blanc-beur fusion that some on the far right see as necessary in order for there to be any real hope of electoral victories for the National Front. Increasingly in both France and in Germany one can expect to see images of Osama bin Laden at neo-Nazi rallies.
This is all, of course, a reaction-complex, as analysts on the American left like to plead. But so is Golden Dawn in Greece, yet in that case no one hesitates to call it what it is, and to fight against it with all political means available, even as we try to understand as analysts what about that society permits fascism to seem like the best option for disaffected and marginalized workers. It’s just not a serious analysis of the situation here in France to suppose that the Islamists represent anything other than a reactionary tendency, which, in increasingly open collusion with the far right, could make things extremely bad in France in the coming years, for everyone, and particularly for the Jews, who are the enduring target of Le Pen père and his unreconstructed Vichy peers. When progressives say, “OK, this is bad, but look over here…”, when they move from the jihadists to the National Front, they are really only pointing to another dimension of the same problem: committed ideologues of various stripes, along with scattered opportunists, all working hard to destroy whatever was left of civil society in France.
The killers, I mean to say, are doing the bidding, with varying degrees of explicitness, of the National Front; of the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church; of the less enlightened forces within the Vatican to which, it seems, Francis is still beholden; of Al-Qaeda and of ISIS: not exactly the forces of liberation one might hope to see cheering on the political actions of members of marginalized groups in France. Meanwhile, there are countless French Muslims fighting for justice, and motivated by progressive ideals, who are being totally ignored by western—well, mostly North American—self-identified progressives, for whom the cries of “offense” from the killers and their clerical supporters in Christendom and Islam drown out everything else that is being done for justice and for recognition.
I lived for nine years in Québec, and during that time I agreed with the great majority of my right-thinking peers that the anti-clerical spirit in both Québec and France was misplaced, a relic of another era, and never anything more than a thin cover for what is in fact only anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant politicking. This is certainly what it is for ignorant and opportunistic politicians such as Pauline Marois. But now, in France, after the attack that began 2015 and the opinions expressed by church leaders afterwards, I have come to appreciate that there still is a need, indeed perhaps more than ever, for anti-clerical interventions in the public space: not, of course, the sort that target innocent members of society for wearing veils—God, no—but the sort that targets the new interfaith fundamentalism, and ridicules any inflated pontiff or mullah who says or implies that the appropriate punishment for ridiculing religion is summary execution. I am, I add, someone who generally identifies as a Christian—a nondenominational, pacifist, anarchist, animal-loving Christian in the spirit of Tolstoy, Jacques Ellul, the “redneck preacher” Will D. Campbell, and the original Francis. I am also strongly attracted to the aesthetics of the Orthodox and Catholic traditions, to their antiquity and their untimeliness. Still, in the current climate, I can only say, too: Down with the Patriarch. Down with the Pope.
The wider global context of the assassinations extends beyond the Islamic world, and beyond the clerical pronouncements of the various Christian sects. On the official account of Russian history now being enforced by the Putin regime, Lenin and Yeltsin represented phases of periodic anarchy in Russian history, while Stalin and Putin himself represent a return of order, a re-regularization that always follows the always brief eruptions of chaos. There is still a vibrant underground art scene thriving in Russia, in spite of intense persecution, that celebrates freedom even though to do so is to risk imprisonment or worse, even when the only way to manifest one’s freedom is to nail one’s testicles to Red Square. (Not so far, then, from Seneca’s “Look at your wrists. There—at any time—lies freedom.”) Putin’s persecution of Pussy Riot a few years back, however displeasing the western pop-media uptake of their cause afterwards may have been, echoed in important ways the Stalinist crackdown on the avant garde in the 1930s, and anticipated in other important ways the transnational crackdown on “blasphemy” currently unfolding.
Why don’t self-identified progressives see this? Because in truth most of them are not artists, not writers, not people for whom the meaning of life is wrapped up in expressive freedom, but rather functionaries, who want to be given rules from authorities, and who want to see people who break these rules punished. These rules will extend not just to matters of economic justice (which, if they were to work, I would welcome too), but also to what may be published, said, or depicted, and, if they get their way, to what may be felt, particularly about the ideas and values of other groups of people, particularly about anyone who ever claims to be offended about anything. They have abandoned the liberatory spirit of 1968 in favor of the regulatory spirit of identitarianism.
There is an unexamined commonplace now floating around the social media, which has it that satire derogates its proper function when it stops targeting the powerful, and targets the relatively powerless instead. Theodor Adorno has also been cited here and there with his remarks on satire in the Minima Moralia of 1951, but few have noticed that the account he offers there stands in direct contradiction to the current received wisdom. For Adorno, satire is in its essence wistful and traditionalist. It looks back to something that has been lost, and dismisses the straight-facedness of everyone who attempts, against all evidence, to maintain the illusion that there is anything respect-worthy about the present state of things. It targets not just elected officials, but the yokels who elected them; not just the honcho who runs the saloon, but the sucker who hands over his last possessions at the poker table. There is a need for this: the yokels and the suckers need it most of all. There is redemption in it, and I confess to harboring whatever amount of traditionalism it takes to appreciate this redemptive quality.
Riffing on Juvenal’s observation—“difficile est saturam non scribere [“It is difficult not to write satire”]—Adorno claims that in the present age “it is difficult to write satire.” The Latin epigrammatist had meant that the world, in its very nature, forces our otherwise earnest sentences to come out as damning quips; the Frankfurt School theorist means that the present, degraded age, the modern age with all its contradictions, does not even contain the possibility of true satire. Here I think I disagree with Adorno as to the reasons, but one thing is certain: in the present age, not Adorno’s age but our own, satire is indeed becoming difficult. You can be assassinated for it, and the moral leaders of the world will not honor your memory, but instead will make excuses.
Over the past few days I’ve been called a “liberal,” a “Walzerite,” an “Aufklärer,” and all sorts of other things I’d never considered. But I do not see the sort of freedom I am advocating as the property of European modernity, as a feature only of bourgeois liberalism. I see it as something ancient, and universal. I admit that it is becoming clear to me anyhow that if this is cast as a split between Dissent and Jacobin, or between the soixante-huitards and the online social justice warriors, it’s fairly clear where my sympathies lie. I do not think “kill your elders” is a viable strategy for progress. And I think this is precisely what happened last week: some old ‘68ers got knocked off—let us not forget, along with some Jews—and the conservatives and neo-Stalinists alike were happy enough to see them go.
So now, as far as I’m concerned, it’s the early Soviet avant-garde and Diogenes the Cynic and Rabelais and the Vienna Actionists, and sundry old hippies and libertine goats, and Art Spiegelman and R. Crumb and Joan Didion (who is at home in the space of moral ambiguity) and Susan Sontag (“What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts.”), and the Arab storytellers who told the raunchy stories that became the Decameron that planted the seed of European humanism versus ISIS and the National Front and Andrei Zhdanov and sotsrealizm and the Vatican and Putin and the online social justice warriors and the North American academic self-styled progressives who are bending over backwards to see the murder of some old cartoonists as anything other than a serious blow by the forces of illiberalism, literal-mindedness, and dogma against subtlety, doubt, imagination, playfulness, and, yes, freedom.
This is not said in the spirit of George W. Bush’s famous war-cry, “they hate our freedom.” My “we” includes Arab cartoonists who are risking their lives in the name of humor because they know that humor is not “mere jokes” but rather freedom itself. It includes artist collectives who fuck against Putin, and it includes foul-mouthed raconteurs and drunks and punks who have no place in a well-regulated system purged of all sources of offense. My “they” includes stiff old vicars and petty rule-enforcers everywhere—but most of all it includes those who are given freedom and don’t know what to do with it, who don’t even know what it is, who are afraid of it, and who are happy to employ proxy forces to come and help eliminate it.
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