Justin Erik Halldór Smith

On Jenny Diski (1947-2016)

I wrote a remembrance of Jenny Diski for n+1. To read the whole piece, go here.

Jenny was a pessimist and a misanthrope of heroic dimensions. But let me qualify that. Let me redefine “misanthropy” for my own purposes, and for Jenny’s memory. Like many people who largely retreat from the world and have some trouble dealing with it, she was so much more lucid and funny about human strivings and failures than those who are happily immersed in it. I always think of her 2003 review of Catherine Blackledge’s The Story of V. Jenny describes her own efforts in the early 1970s to work with the 12- and 13-year-old boys in a juvenile halfway house, called the Free School, neighboring a London feminist center run by “bourgeois hippy adventurers,” and the differences in goals and desires that separated these two groups:

One night I was in the Free School late. I saw a light on in the women’s hut and went to have a look. A window had been forced open. One of the younger boys from the school was standing in the middle of the room, masturbating furiously, his eyes fixed intently on a large, full-color wall poster of a wide-open vulva with a sassy feminist slogan underneath about men not being required. It seemed not so much vicious as funny and sad.

Mocking of human self-seriousness but charitable to human beings themselves, Jenny offered a living example of how, sometimes, compassion can be born of misanthropy. That is the person who comes across in a passage such as this. The writer who comes across is the one who understands, as a writer must, that what is funny is sad, and vice versa, and the writer’s task is to draw out this identity, where the blunt-minded ideologue or ordinary person can only perceive the one face of things or the other. Jenny had continental Jewish roots and a rough London childhood. She spent time in institutions, and was also taken in, and eventually expelled, by Doris Lessing. She had a daughter, Chloe, with a first husband, Roger Diski, who drowned while swimming in Sierra Leone in 2011. She had a second husband, Ian Patterson, to whom she always referred as “the Poet,” who by all accounts, notably her own, made the last eighteen years of her life the happiest ones. She wrote roughly a dozen novels, and seven or so works of non-fiction.

One of her novels, Monkey’s Uncle (1994), is in part narrated by an orangutan named Jenny, who picnics with Marx, Darwin, and Freud. Her debt to Kafka, and to Mitteleuropa in general, comes through here, as also, I suspect, some evidence of her true position relative to her own species. She told me at one point how happy it had made her to learn that “Jenny” was a popular name for orangutans in 19th-century zoos. Her living body of work reads to me now like something of an extended “Report to an Academy”: an Academy made up of human beings who, for whatever complicated reasons (genetics, developmental psychology, destiny) always remained somewhat strange to her. And from the lifelong feeling of being not quite a human being, Jenny illuminated for us (with words that are still alive) the mystery of what it is, or what it would be, to be one.

Philosophy is Said in Many Ways

I recently did an interview for the Princeton University Press blog about my new book, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types. To read the full interview, go here.

PUP: This book doesn’t have a conventional structure or approach. In addition to straightforward scholarly exposition, it also contains autobiographical elements, as well as what appear to be fictional excursuses, written from the perspective of invented historical figures who represent different philosophical types. What are the reasons for this experimental approach?

JS: When I began speaking with my editor at Princeton University Press, what intrigued him most were some reflections of mine on the relationship between the activity of a philosopher and the practical need we all have to earn money and pay the bills. I had recently moved to Paris, was having trouble making ends meet with my modest French university salary, and so had begun experimenting with some ‘freelance’ philosophical dialogues with people willing to pay—mostly Anglo tourists who were looking to experience the frisson of sitting in a Parisian café and talking about love and death and stuff just like Sartre and De Beauvoir. So when I began writing, that personal experience served as the point of departure for reflecting on the long history of the problematic relationship between money and philosophy—after all, one of the most common foundation myths of the tradition is that it began when Socrates refused remuneration, thus liberating whatever it is we’re doing qua philosophers from whatever it is the Sophists had been doing. This approach then sort of expanded to other parts of the book: launching into an investigation of some aspect of the definition of philosophy by revealing something about my own personal engagement with it.

As for the fictional elements, I suppose this is just an irrepressible symptom of the sort of writing I’ve come to believe can best get across what I’m trying to do philosophically. I’m with Margaret Cavendish, who explicitly lays out at the beginning of her delirious 1666 novel, Blazing World, how it is that fantasy can be harnessed and utilized for the exploration of philosophical questions in ways for which the faculty of reason alone might be less ideally suited. I faced some resistance to these portions of the book from some readers of drafts. They wanted me to more clearly mark off and explain what I was doing in them, somewhat as Martha Nussbaum does when she introduces a fictional figure in one of her books to guide as through the exposition of arguments that follow. But I didn’t want my characters to serve simply as didactic aides. I wanted rather for the work to be, at least in part, a work of fiction, a product, like Cavendish’s, of the literary imagination.

PUP: Is this book philosophy, or is it about philosophy?

JS: I don’t know that there can really be a valid distinction here. By the same token, I’ve never understood what people mean when they talk about ‘metaphilosophy’. We’re all just trying to come to a clearer understanding of the nature of this activity we’re engaged in, in order, in part, to better engage in it. Philosophy is peculiar in that a great deal of effort is expended, by those who profess to practice it, in seeking to determine where its boundaries are, and what falls outside of them. This is a problem sedimentologists, say, don’t have, and one might easily suspect that philosophy is essentially constituted by this activity, that there’s not much left over to do once philosophers have stopped trying to determine what philosophy is not. I think my approach, the transregional and wide-focused historical survey of the very different ways people we think of as philosophers have themselves conceived what they were doing, helps to establish this point: ‘philosophy’ is said in many ways, to paraphrase Aristotle. I’m sure some critics who have some stake in portraying philosophy as essentially thus rather than so, or vice versa, will be quick to say that this book is ‘not philosophy’. But I think I can survive that, and in fact I think they’ll be helping to support my thesis...

Notes on a Hoax

I have been called upon to help to introduce to an English-speaking readership the recent hoax carried out by my friends and colleagues, Philippe Huneman and Anouk Barberousse, who submitted a fake and preposterous article under the fictitious name of Benedetta Tripodi to the Journal of Badiou Studies, a forum dedicated to research on the work of the French philosopher Alain Badiou.

Let me begin by saying that I am no more interested in taking sides in this conflagration than in the one that transpired between Pierre Gassendi and Robert Fludd some centuries ago as to whether or not eclipses can help us predict the course of human affairs. I tend to see conflicts in the world of ideas from a distance, as an outsider, without a stake. This is not because I don’t have convictions of my own —I do— but because in general I don’t think these convictions are best pressed for by taking sides and by battering adversaries. This is in part because, like Leibniz, I believe that everyone is in some sense right, and that it is just a matter of clarifying the terms in which we express our views; and in part because, like the Skeptics, I believe that everyone is in some sense wrong, and doesn’t have a clue what the hell they’re talking about.

Alain Badiou, we may at least say, does not draw much from either of these legacies. He seems fairly certain that his own adversaries are substantively wrong, and if he does not take from the Skeptics the cautious attitude toward his own views that he may not know what the hell he is talking about, he at least ensures that many of us, who are not he, will not know what the hell he is talking about.

This, I suspect, is not a glitch, but rather is central to the program. Scholars of religious studies have often identified something similar in the dogmas of sects: it is not in spite of the fact that a Christian cannot possibly make any sense of the claim that God is three and one at once that he or she continues to have faith; it is because of this core mystery that Christianity has such a hold on the believer’s soul. One need not deal in claims about the transcendent realm in order to draw followers to a movement in this way. I have suspected for a while that some of what is done under the banner of ‘disability studies’ functions like a sort of religious sect to the extent that it insists on incompatible commitments, and distinguishes between insiders and outsiders by noting who is willing to keep quiet about the incompatibility. For example, not every disability can be equally accommodated in a given public setting; to make a room accessible to vision-impaired people by means of bright fluorescent lights might make the room less accessible for people prone to migraines. There are trade-offs in life, outsiders will say. That is a concession to ableism, reply the insiders, grim-faced. Replace 'migraines' with set theory, and 'vision-impairment' with communism, and you have a fairly good sense of how Badiousianism works. 

Badiou may not be a 'postmodern', he may even, as he insists, despise postmodernism. Yet I can report, at least, that my experience attending his talks has been remarkably similar to what I've felt when trying to listen, some years ago now, to Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy: I feel as though I am interrupting something, an intimate moment between old friends, grudgingly tolerant of the anxious young aspirants swarming around them trying to gain their attention, and completely indifferent to those who are neither in the inner circle nor hoping to enter it. I should add that I do not have this feeling in other academic settings where I am a relative interloper: I can go to a conference on palaeoanthropology or on Shakespeare, and I can see that the participants all go way back together and are part of what is in many respects a club, and yet there remains this external thing --palaeoanthropology or Shakespeare-- that does not belong to them, that they recognise as something that strangers care about, and that justifies my presence there as well as theirs. 

I suspect anyhow that mysterianism is a necessary and ineliminable part of the way people come together around common visions, and that in themselves they are neither good nor bad. So I will not join my friends Huneman and Barberousse in criticising the Badiousians for their apparent inability to make it all cohere. Some collective projects, even collective projects motivated by big ideas, do not share this desideratum.

My first reaction to both Huneman and Barberousse’s canular, as well as to Badiou’s ferocious response, was a deep sincere laugh. But this reaction quickly gave way, in each case, to some substantial concerns. To turn first to Badiou’s reaction.* He used some great words: sous-fifre (an underling, a lowly non-entity), for example, and he made the authors of the original text look pretty foolish and vain, motivated by nothing more than base ressentiment. But then it struck me: Badiou is some years older now than Socrates was at the time of his trial, when he asked ironically if those who had accused him really expected him to fight back, now, at his age, to petulantly insist that the accusations are unfounded. As if to convince anyone of this would thereby win him immortality! Socrates did not do this, to have done so would have been completely out of keeping with his character.

What sort of distinguished old men, what great silverbacks on top of their fields, be it statesmanship or letters or philosophy, do fight back? The ones with thin skins, the ones for whom influence can only go together with power, rather than than with the cultivation of an exemplary life. This is the reaction, mutatis mutandis, of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who does not like being lampooned by a bawdy comedian. It is the reaction of American philosophy blogger Brian Leiter, who, in his words, must yearly ‘plan out [his] litigation strategy’ in order to bring some peculiar version of justice to all those he sees as having committed ‘per se defamation’ against him. It is the conduct of small tyrants (i.e., all tyrants), not of philosophers, and especially not those who have made it to the august age of the senex. If you think the people who mock you really are sous-fifres, then why on earth should you let them eat at you so? You’re almost 80 years old, Badiou. Congratulate the hoaxers on their small victory and let it pass. Aquila non captat muscas. 

But what sort of victory is it? Here my laughter on first reading Huneman and Barberousse's text quickly gave way to two concerns. One is that the joke is not so much on the abstruse theory-heads, as had surely been the case in the Sokal incident. The joke isn’t on anyone who is committed to any particular ideology or style of thinking at all. The joke is, rather, on the folks running these pop-up online journals with their ludicrously low editorial standards.

Remarkably, the editors of the Journal of Badiou Studies even admitted as much when they complained of Huneman and Barberousse’s ‘dated’ method of attack “in an age when the pressures on independent Open Access publishing include underfunding and time-pressured staff.” In other words, the editors effectively confess that they do not have the resources to produce a decent journal on their own, and so must rely on the good will of the contributors to not send them crap.

But many people who submit to journals are not in a position to know of their own work whether it is crap or not, and for this reason alone a journal that does not have the resources to weed out crap would be doing scholarship a far greater service by simply not existing. The problem is compounded in the context of continental European publishing in English, where often, at every stage of production, from writing to proofreading to publishing, all of the people involved speak English, at best, as a second language. What slipped through at the Journal of Badiou Studies does not in fact look so different from what slips through on a regular basis at Springer or Brill.

Incidentally, no one so far has explained whether that curious word ‘Strive’, being used as a noun in the title of the hoax article, is part of the hoax, or whether it is part of the more general context of continental pseudo-English in which alone such a hoax could occur.

It seems to me in other words that what this hoax exposes is not so much Badiou, or his gullible acolytes, but rather the dismal state of publishing today— or perhaps we should not dignify it in this way, and instead call it what it is: posting. The Journal of Badiou Studies is a website masquerading as an academic journal. It has an editorial board (of which Badiou himself is a merely ‘decorative’ member), but it is run rather more like the Huffington Post or, dare I say, The Guardian: it is a place that lets people deposit stuff they have written, and then call it a ‘publication’. In this respect it is not clear whether what Huneman and Barberousse have exposed is something much smaller, or much bigger, than what Sokal exposed twenty years ago. Sokal exposed an elite and illicit hot-air factory; the most recent hoax exposes something that we should all already know about but somehow need to be reminded of: there is no such thing as academia anymore, but only countless fly-by-night ventures ensuring that everyone gets to play along.

If there had been any editorial standards at all the journal’s representatives could at least have checked up on the author. In spite of Huneman and Barberousse’s claim, the University of Iași is not off in some inaccessible fantasy world. It is a university in an EU country, with multiple exchange agreements with campuses of the University of Paris. I myself have visited there and know several good philosophers who hail from there. If an article had been submitted to me purporting to be by someone from Iași named ‘Benedetta’, I would immediately have suspected something was wrong.

Here I am reminded of a similar hoax in 2010, when --to cite Perry Anderson-- the crass booby Bernard-Henri Lévy referenced a certain Jean-Baptiste Botul, a supposed expert on Kant, as a source for his own work. It was only later revealed to him that the school of ‘botulisme’ was invented, as a joke, by a French journalist. Botul was supposed to have been particularly influential among the neo-Kantians of Paraguay: a sort of ruse that was supposed to make all readers in France shrug their shoulders and say, ‘What do I know about Paraguayan neo-Kantianism?’ At the time a close friend of mine, an Argentine philosopher who was well traveled on the South American philosophical conference circuit, felt the need to protest that he did in fact know quite a bit about the Paraguayan neo-Kantians, and that from his point of view the whole farce about Botulisme rang completely and obviously false. Romania and Paraguay, I mean, are not just places in the French imagination. They are also places, real places with real philosophers, whose real existence makes the invocation of these places for the purpose of a hoax seem to fall particularly flat. If I may say one good thing about Badiou here, it is that he does seem to be sharply aware of the real existence of Iași, and Asunción, and of the fact that there are real people in those places engaged in real thinking.

One final point about Huneman and Barberousse’s intervention: it is not, it seems to me, nearly so nonsensical as its authors take it to be. This might be a general problem with hoaxes, or it might by contrast be a compelling argument for their proliferation: satirical imitations of the way people who take themselves seriously talk are also reflections of the way they talk. With time and distance these reflections can turn out, for the purposes of understanding what a given intellectual current is all about, to be just as useful as, or even more useful than, the productions of that current's straight-faced partisans. Lucian of Samosata is a valuable resource for the study of Greek philosophy, especially where the texts he is satirising have gone missing. Similarly, I take it that some generations from now Tripodi's contribution to the Journal of Badiou Studies will have turned out to be a real contribution to Badiou studies, notwithstanding the intentions of her creators. Huneman and Barberousse have succeeded in studying the dreary idiom of the Badiousians attentively enough to be able to convincingly channel it. I take it that we can learn something about this idiom from their contribution, and that in time the spirit in which it was generated —contrarian rather than aspirational-sycophantic— will matter less and less.

I am a strong supporter of hoaxes. I think they are healthy and necessary, and I have been involved in some myself. I am not convinced that the nature of their salutary effect is that it sets us back on the right path: the path of straightforward, serious, straight-faced inquiry. I suspect rather that they are an intrinsic and ineliminable part of of the project: the part that has to be there because love of truth is not just a grim and pursed-lipped thing, but a playful one too.

Who comes out of this incident grim-faced and dour? Badiou, certainly. The editors of the website that calls itself a journal: they come out looking simply sad, perhaps in need of a break. Philippe and Anouk just look busy now, dealing with the cascade of further writing responsibilities their initial volley has precipitated, and articulating what to my mind are some fairly compelling points about the need to stir things up as they have. Me, I'm just happy to pass all this along, and to get back to reading Gassendi and Fludd.

--

*Here is Badiou's reply:

"I never read Badiou Studies, of course, and my 'presence' on the editorial committee is --this should be obvious to you-- of a decorative nature. What strikes me in all this is the total ignorance of my work revealed by the maneuvers of these two would-be philosophers who have gone astray in their little machinations. It is, for any serious reader, absolutely idiotic to identify me with the 'postmodern', the rhetorical vacuity of which I have denounced many times. I am a classical thinker, conceptual, deductive, systematic, everything the 'postmoderns' despise. As for questioning my competence in mathematics: this is precisely what no mathematician has done. I even have a feverishly admiring letter from Jean Dieudonné (concerning my book about Number), a particularly severe man, who hails, precisely, the contrast between my competence in this domain and the ignorance of most 'philosophers', notably those in the analytic school who love to talk about science and logic. Of course, mathematicians can criticise the metaphysical use I have made, like Plato or Descartes or Leibniz, of their discipline, But they cannot criticise me for not knowing it. It is enough to open Being and Event or The Logic of Worlds, in order to appreciate that I give the entire proof of all the theorems that I mention. It is quite natural that these two underlings of academic philosophy are angry that in the whole world no one cares about their existence. That they transform their humiliation and ressentiment into low intrigues: Nietzsche teaches us that this is practically inevitable."

Charlie Hebdo Drops a Bomb

After a 2015 filled with near constant polemics on the subject, I had hoped to retire from discussing Charlie Hebdo, at least in English. But on Sunday the French magazine posted on its website an evidently non-satirical editorial, in English, seeming to make explicit the Islamophobic convictions that had motivated the cartoons that provoked the murder of its principal contributors on January 7, 2015. The anti-Charlie forces in Anglophone social media immediately crowed that they had told us so, that this was just the latest proof of what we should have seen all along.

The editorial is feeble. It runs together three stock figures of the Muslim minority in France, and treats them all as symptoms of one and the same social problem. These are, to wit, the nominally Muslim teenagers who are radicalised and coaxed into blowing themselves up; the pious Muslim man who seeks to integrate into French society economically while remaining, in his soul and on his knees, oriented toward Mecca; and, finally, the subjugated Muslim woman forced by her patriarchal community to wear a veil.

Each of these figures, obviously, deserves independent consideration, and it is only the crudest straw-man fantasy about some monolithic Islam that would run them together.

The teenagers, for one thing, probably could have been drawn into a different sort of death cult that told them a different sort of fairy tale, if they had been born in a different time and place. The anxiety about losing the freedom to select pork products at the local sandwicherie, in turn, is an expression of a distinctly French parochialism, and one that in many of its expressions is positively adored by the Anglo-American left. All our effusion over the French perfection of the good life through slow and artisanal food, through rejection of GMOs, fails to grasp that the value placed on these things in French culture is the expression of a world-view that is always a hair’s breadth away from chauvinism. It says: our way of life is the best in the world, it grows right up out of the soil; don’t tread on us. It is only when this traditionalism bumps up against the traditionalism of halal dietary customs that it makes us uncomfortable.

I have no patience for either of these. The ethnic cuisine of my people comes pre-packaged and microwave-ready, and I find this freedom from concerns about terroir and authenticity in my eating habits well-suited to my cosmopolitan politics. I do think ham should be outlawed in France and everywhere else, but out of respect for the creature it comes from, not fear of it. The fact that the never-ending hecatomb of meat production can come up as a tangential issue in the course of discussing another, supposedly more serious issue might serve as a reminder of how much of our political life is really just a matter of picking and choosing.

But I don’t really want to discuss the argument of the editorial itself. I want to try to make sense, one more time, of the cultural role of Charlie Hebdo, and of what the Anglo commentariat might be missing about it. A first point, one that should be obvious, is that most of the luminaries among the magazine’s contributors are dead now, so we can't really talk about a continuity of identity between the operation to which the assassinations were a response, and what Charlie Hebdo is coming up with now. This editorial seems to reflect most of all the spirit of Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier), rather than the other victims of January 7. Charb was in his forties, and was not one of the senior cohort, such as Cabu and Wolinski, whose outlook was forged in the 1960s and whose principal preoccupation seems to have been the corruption of the French power elite, the cravenness of the Catholic church, the horrible spectre of the rise of the National Front.

Charb was significantly less committed to satire as a mode of engagement with the world than the others, and wanted to offer straightforward arguments, often about what he saw as the threats arising from mass Muslim migration to Europe. Quite apart from any consideration of his politics, Charb’s approach was never what Charlie Hebdo did best. As a cartoon by Luz of September 2015 didactically explains, satire is not only a way of making critical points about society or politics, as one might do in an Op-Ed piece; it is its own discursive mode, in which different rules and different standards of evaluation apply. I think Charlie Hebdo is at its best when it remains in this mode.

A second point has to do with the role of laïcité in French society. I was struck recently watching the Soviet silent-film director Dziga Vertov's 1934 Three Songs for Lenin for what it reveals about the longer history of 'the question of the veil'. The first 'song' features, just a few minutes in, the bold intertitle, 'My face was in a dark prison', followed by a sequence of images meant to show that the arrival of Marxist-Leninism would free the people of Muslim Central Asia from their backward and superstitious ways. Now you might suppose that this is just a strong-armed Stalin-era perversion of the nominal ideology of the Soviet Union, but in fact we find substantially the same view in Marx himself, as in an 1851 newspaper article in which he argues that the introduction of industrial weaving by the British in Bengal is the best thing that ever happened there, as it broke up the traditional village economies that were also the foundation of patriarchal despotism.

This presumption remains a real factor in much of the thinking of the Arab and European left on questions of culture and the limits of toleration. Something close to it is what guides Hafid Melhay, the owner of Libre Ère, the finest bookstore in Ménilmontant. Hafid is originally from Tunisia, and his shop specializes in Palestinian poetry, histories of the 20th-century non-aligned movement, scripts for plays like Kwame N'goran's Rosa Luxemburg. His humble shop, dare I say, has rather more useful resources for making sense of the present situation than the Librairie Essalam a few doors down from it on the Boulevard de Belleville, an Islamic bookstore featuring in its window French translations of the infamous Harun Yahya's screed against the theory of evolution, and some self-help manuals with tips on how to become happier through a deepening of piety. Back at Libre Ère, Hafid volunteers his services as a scribe and translator for recent immigrants from the Arabic-speaking world, and keeps posted in the store's entryway, inserted among so many classic works of socialist theory, of Arab and African nationalism, of postcolonial criticism, a classic Charlie Hebdo cover. If you're a North African socialist in Ménilmontant this combination of cultural products makes quite a bit more sense than if you are an American social-media activist desperate, above all, to be seen as taking the right side on the issue of the day, which means above all refusing to acknowledge that some questions have complicated histories and there might be no right side to take.

One of the things organised religions excel at is the control and subordination of women. This is, as American academics like to say, 'problematic', and in a way that we are all perfectly prepared to acknowledge when it comes, for example, to the restriction of abortion rights in the United States by the Christian right. Addressing this problem, when it is manifested in minority communities such as the Muslim population of France, can exacerbate their persecution and strengthen the hand of reactionary forces like the party of Marine Le Pen. But the distastefulness of this consequence does not make religious patriarchalism go away. As far as I can tell, the claim of most of the contributors to Charlie Hebdo, to be defenders of secularism who do not have a particular hostility to Islam, is, by their own lights, sincere. This sincerity may involve a failure to recognise the ways in which they are abetting the far right in France, but it may also be rooted in a sharper attunement to the concerns and challenges of people such as those who frequent Libre Ère. They are keeping alive a real, significant strand of the genetic legacy of the left, one which can only be cut out with significant reconceptualisation of what the left's core desiderata are. 

Social-media activists of the Anglophone soi-disant left have discarded the element of their political legacy that equated progress and liberation with the throwing off of the shackles of tradition, and have adopted as an article of faith the view that each community has its own internal standards by which alone it can be judged. Many of my acquaintances on the Anglophone left like to pretend to be neo-Bolsheviks, and often display that striking propaganda poster from the golden age of Soviet graphic design that says "A woman is also a person." But they are picking and choosing too. The refusal to acknowledge as oppressive anything that is done in the name of Islam is in real contradiction with certain other commitments they have, such as economic parity and full legal equality between men and women. Acknowledging this contradiction is not in itself a failure, and it need in no way be an incitement to persecution of marginalised minority groups. The only real failure is pretending things are simpler than they are. To do so is certainly much more likely to abet those politicians, such as Le Pen or Trump, whose success relies on simplistic formulae. And it is also to betray those countless millions of people from the Muslim world who are themselves wary of the claims of tradition, and of the forms of oppression that are so often excused in its name.

I do not believe the state has any business banning articles of clothing. This flows from a more general commitment to the principle that the state has no business intervening in cultural matters at all, whether culture is conceptualised in terms of 'religion' or not. For one thing, to allow the state to do this sort of thing sets government officials up as ethnographers, art critics, and other sub-species of hermeneuticist. I can't help but notice when in the Balkans that there are many Christian women with their heads covered as well. This is supposed to be an expression of 'culture', and not religion, but in the end, if pressed for explanation, somewhere down the line God is going to come up as the ground and rationale of the prohibition on exposed hair. Yet no Bulgarian grandmother would be told by any conceivable future French state that she must remove her head scarf in order to visit this secular country. I don't know what counts as religion, in other words, and I am a relatively subtle interpreter of culture, so I don't really see how a state bureaucracy could know.

Patriarchy can be perpetuated through women's headgear, in the Christian Balkans as in Muslim Anatolia or the Maghreb, even if not all women's religious attire is experienced by its wearers as oppressive. There is a real danger, if the state sets itself up to fight patriarchy by intervening in matters of attire, that this will only in fact create a further pressure, a new possibility for oppression, of the most marginalised and least powerful members of society. So we are left with a true dilemma.

I prefer to take the horn of it, as of many dilemmas in politics, that minimises state encroachment on individual freedom, as well as on the self-determination of sub-state communities. But in this I see myself as decisively breaking with anything that deserves to be called 'the left', in favour of something much closer to anarchism. Yet I am inclined to see the position of Charlie Hebdo, with which I disagree, as representing, again, a sincere and legitimate stance on a real social problem. This is the stance of the traditional left, and it cannot be reduced to simple Islamophobia, any more than Marx's argument for the assimilation of Jews into German society, and thus willy-nilly the eradication of Judaism, can be conflated with Hitlerism. Of course these are different stances. The new, social-media-based Anglophone left, to the extent that it dismisses French secularism as xenophobia tout court, is simply neglecting a significant part of its own legacy, and is misunderstanding much of what is at stake in the current French debate.