What can 'culture' do to counter the religious fanaticism, the murderous madness that has struck Paris and Copenhagen? The immediate response seems to be: absolutely nothing. If we come at it from the opposite direction, it would mean forgetting that Goebbels appreciated Dostoyevsky (the cruel irony being that he particularly loved one of the most profound books ever written about the phenomenon of nihilism, Demons, also sometimes entitled The Possessed), and that in 1932 the Nazis celebrated the centenary of Goethe's death with a clear conscience.
It seems to me that it is incredibly naive to refer to culture as a kind of self-contained essence that spreads goodness and neighbourly love in its wake. But how? Through capillary action? In bottles? Radovan Karadžić studied at Columbia University. Nikola Koljević, a highly respected Shakespeare scholar, ordered the phosphorus bombing of the central library in Sarajevo. There are countless examples of how high culture has never prevented people from committing the most terrible outrages.
I believe it is much more pressing and necessary to challenge the alarming isolationist tendency that is particularly prevalent in France's cultural milieu – among artists, intellectuals, commentators and so on. With typical acerbity, author and film-maker Guy Debord said that their "métier is talking in the prevailing conditions". We must constantly examine the opportunity that is presented to us, that is presented to me now, to speak out about the current political circumstances (therefore from a series of crushing economic and symbolic power structures).
We must constantly remember that many people who live in our societies remain invisible, they never speak out. We also have to consider the rather graphic saying from 1968: literature is a garnish for those who fuck the people in the ass. We have to think about this desire for separateness and fathom what lies behind the language of domination, the empty phrases, the slogans – which all too often we simply adopt.
In my view, Karl Kraus provides a valuable chapter in our present times because the kinds of archaic powers that we thought had disappeared (such as religious fanaticism) have broken through into our ultrarationality. In the 1930s, Kraus had already identified the rise of National Socialism, this "concurrence of electrical engineering and mythology, of splitting the atom and funeral pyres, of everything that was and is no more". Similarly, the IS terror group is combining Hollywood propaganda films and the extremely effective use of social media with stonings, crucifixions and beheadings.
Karl Kraus wrote: "Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden." Nazi totalitarianism inveigled its way into people's minds though a series of expressions that were accepted automatically and thoughtlessly. So this Viennese polemicist wanted to teach us to "see abysses where there are platitudes". It is vital to make the mental effort to sniff out these platitudes. If humanity had no slogans it would need no weapons.
Hitler's excesses were brought to an end with weapons, not with arguments.
Pierre Legendre, “The Crime of Corporal Lortie”
In times that are dominated by technical and scientific Newspeak and a crushing sense of political powerlessness, there is always the temptation for artists and intellectuals to talk themselves into believing that their actions have political meaning or political effect, contrary to all the obvious facts and blatant rebuttals of reality. After the initial shock of the Paris attacks in January, old habits seem to have re-established themselves as if nothing has happened.
All in all, it seems to me that it is simpler, more pressing and more painful to question the things that we all take for granted. This includes our responsibility for establishing (or disseminating) a Newspeak that is creating havoc in our language and even threatens to destroy the only opportunity for an encounter with others. Plato said that talking to each other requires mutual goodwill and a common language.
We also know that in our circles there are ritual transgressions, incantations and righteous indignations that lead to nothing. In his writings about the state, Pierre Bourdieu compares the "heretic" (hérétique) with the "controlled transgressor" (transgresseur contrôlé) and quotes the famous words of author Nicolas Chamfort at the time of the French Revolution: “The vicar-general can smile at remarks about religion, the bishop can laugh out loud and the cardinal can say his piece.”
It seems to me that publications with lovely, clear political subject matter and beautiful attention-grabbing titles such as 'Illegals', 'Migrants' and so on often have little to offer in literary or political terms. Every time the existing balance of power is questioned, it occurs through an operation on the language itself, its supposed evidence and the grammatical fictions that it entails. I feel more challenged by works that clearly demonstrate what Nietzsche called the grammatical fiction of the ego, which open the floodgates of meaning and do not allow themselves to be reduced to an intention or a discourse about the state of the world.
It is the consciousness of our porosity, our division, that perhaps makes us more suspicious of political discourse, more sensitive towards everything that purports to define and investigate us, a little less sure of ourselves and our demarcations.
A true Other for us ('us' in the broad sense of academics, artists, readers of these lines, etc.) could be the supporters of Le Pen with their paranoia, fear of losing social status, racism – at the heart of which a broad section of the French political classes have set up an appointment to tickle their tummies…this may also be the socially disadvantaged in the suburbs or elsewhere, who are susceptible to the siren calls of Salafism.
It is precisely this language, this Other, that literature may dare to reveal in order to make tangible the power and dizziness that is contained therein, but also to steer them elsewhere. Rather than adopt a moralising and hovering stance (which is totally ineffective and serves only to reassure us until the next attack), we could try to construct characters, discourses and refrains in order to try to discover these affects in ourselves, which are there with all the rest – and which are also (and of course not solely) a reaction to the violence of Newspeak.
The stand-up style of Pierre Desproges and Coluche in France, of Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks in the USA with their daring sketches, verbal derailments, their nonsense, provides a possible example of this opening up to another language (or we could also cite the yes men who adopt the language of power in order to hijack it all the more and reveal the kinds of absurdities that we have gradually assimilated).
A true Other for us could be the supporters of Le Pen with their paranoia, fear of losing social status, racism.
Do not fear this potential proximity, let it unfurl in order to reveal the absurdity or madness, that which has not been thought about, its potential, unwitting comedy. I am fascinated by texts that give this worst case a voice, texts that are not afraid of their power but displace it, penetrate it, cause it to collide with something else.
This is how we fight against the very real and growing danger that results from this worst case, and indeed it is much more effective than counter-arguments or heartfelt indignation. No virtuous pose can result from a paranoid discourse or from the power of nihilist destruction (whether or not it comes cloaked in religion). Let us return to our earlier example: the prodigious power of Dostoyevsky's Demons is due to his empathy with his subject (Russian nihilists). As a man, Dostoyevsky hated them with all his heart, but as a writer he knew how to put words in their mouths to reveal their comedy and ideological paucity. This book is often terrifying, but also full of searing humour.
Let me mention to the kaleidoscope, the melting pot that is in Alfred Döblin’s novel “Berlin Alexanderplatz”, where people get drunk, kill themselves, pull out each other's hair. It flows seamlessly: Isaac resisting his sacrifice by Abraham, the pimp Biberkopf and the little whore Mieze, railway timetables, voices on the streets, cries announcing the return of Agamemnon from Troy, a whole bestiary running wild. The description seems like an inexhaustible reservoir of voices and ways of enunciating that includes every point of view, beings, things, animals.
Döblin acts as a mouthpiece for the violence and brutality of the milieu of interlopers where his story is set and allows the worst male violence to occur (from the point of view of the women who are raped or murdered in his book). It is striking to note that this book, which has now been turned into a museum piece and rendered (almost) inoffensive, received almost universal acclaim when it was translated into French by Olivier Le Lay in 2008. If it were to be published today, without the dubious glory of being a masterpiece from the past, I am quite sure that it would trigger endless 'social' debates and no doubt lead to terrible accusations against its author.
In conclusion, I would also like to call on the oh-so-stimulating example of Montaigne from another time in our history. The miracle of his Essais is that they constantly create equal relationships: between the reader and the author (who opens up the whole of his library), between the authors quoted (Lucretius rubs shoulders with Saint Augustine, Plato, Tacitus, Virgil and Muhammad), and also between human reason (the European horizon of the time at the end of the 16th century) and the animal or mineral world, or other alternate worlds (such as cannibalism). In Of Cannibals, Montaigne shifts the perspective by raising the question of the humanity of cannibals. If we are shocked by their cannibalism, they in turn are shocked by the inequality that rages in Europe.
I am fascinated by texts that give this worst case a voice, texts that are not afraid of their power but displace it, penetrate it, cause it to collide with something else.
And in “An Apology for Raymond Sebond” (Essais, volume 2, chapter 12), Montaigne questions the various ways in which the afterlife is portrayed, placing Muslims, Christians and Platonists in the same boat. In the following lines, I quote extensively from a excellent talk given by François Athané and Isabelle Schlichting at a colloquium organised by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) entitled Misinterpretations of Islam. How should we imagine the afterlife? How is it conceived by Christians, Muslims and Platonists?
Montaigne shows us that there is a kind of fatality in representations because we are unable to escape from the experiential framework of our world. As a result, all representations of the next world are false. So Montaigne refers to the typically earthly joy of recognizing and being reunited with our nearest and dearest; Christian eschatology has used the resurrection to make lavish promises of such happiness in the next life.
If we take a classic topos of criticism of Islam by Christians, that is to say the sensuality of the Muslim paradise, the author shows that this criticism also applies to Christian portrayals of the afterlife. This is Montaigne's scepticism, which turns the tables in the form of a 'waterer watered': resurrection and reunion with our nearest and dearest in the afterlife are just as much a joy for the senses as the houris, the "women of outstanding beauty" of the Koran.
So the eschatology is condemned to be contradictory: by constructing another world through an anthropological fatality it reduces this other world to our world. This has universal application, for the paradise of others as well as that of ourselves. Thus, Montaigne's scepticism leads to a theory about the universal; it turns on its head Christian ethnocentrism, which expresses itself in mockery of the Muslim paradise. Montaigne helps us to dismantle this mimetic trap. He shows that Christian mockery of the Muslim paradise can also be turned on the Christian view of the afterlife. The prejudice displayed towards others contradicts itself because, in a typically sceptical gesture, it is turned against the holder of this prejudice.
Montaigne was not particularly wellversed in the Muslim tradition, and here he displays what could be called a hermeneutic goodwill by selecting from two possible interpretations the one that gives the text the richest and most robust connotation. Nowadays, at a time when we are able to read translations of the Koran in paperback, it seems to me that the historical approach of this gentleman from Gascony is particularly fruitful.
The prejudice displayed towards others contradicts itself because, in a typically sceptical gesture, it is turned against the holder of this prejudice.
With Döblin, with Montaigne, we find a porosity towards the alternate world(s) that offers us inexhaustible resources to fight against Newspeak (political, journalistic and cultural) and the violent impulses that they transmit.
Otherwise, we can adopt the words of French philosopher Jacques Bouveresse: "when speaking without thinking, it is normal to find oneself also acting without thinking and, at the final stage, considering the action itself – preferably energetic and brutal – as the only way of really speaking, the only language that is still capable of being understood."
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