The Event of <em>Charlie Hebdo</em>: Imaginaries of Freedom and Control 9781785330766

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction: The Event of Charlie Hebdo—Imaginaries of Freedom and Control
The Barbariat and Democratic Tolerance
Charlie Hebdo: The West and the Sacred
The Thoughtcrimes of an Eight-Year-Old
Imaginaries of Violence and Surrogates for Politics
Where Were You, Charlie? Contesting Voices of Political Activism in the Wake of a Tragedy
Moral, All-Too Moral: Satire, Morality, and Charlie Hebdo
On Blasphemy: The Paradoxes of Protecting and Mocking God
Afterword: When Is a Joke Not a Joke? The Paradox of Egalitarianism

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The Event of Charlie Hebdo

Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis General Editor: Bruce Kapferer Volume 1 THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AND GLOBAL CRISIS Critical Perspectives Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 2 GLOBALIZATION Critical Issues Edited by Allen Chun Volume 3 CORPORATE SCANDAL Global Corporatism against Society Edited by John Gledhill Volume 4 EXPERT KNOWLEDGE First World Peoples, Consultancy, and Anthropology Edited by Barry Morris and Rohan Bastin Volume 5 STATE, SOVEREIGNTY, WAR Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 6 THE RETREAT OF THE SOCIAL The Rise and Rise of Reductionism Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 7 OLIGARCHS AND OLIGOPOLIES New Formations of Global Power Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 8 NATIONALISM’S BLOODY TERRAIN Racism, Class Inequality, and the Politics of Recognition Edited by George Baca

Volume 9 Identifying with freedom Indonesia after Suharto Edited by Tony Day Volume 10 THE GLOBAL IDEA OF ‘THE COMMONS’ Edited by Donald M. Nonini Volume 11 Security and Development Edited by John-Andrew McNeish and Jon Harald Sande Lie Volume 12 MIGRATION, DEVELOPMENT, AND TRANSNATIONALIZATION A Critical Stance Edited by Nina Glick Schiller and Thomas Faist Volume 13 War, Technology, Anthropology Edited by Koen Stroeken Volume 14 ARAB SPRING Uprisings, Powers, Interventions Edited by Kjetil Fosshagen Volume 15 THE EVENT OF CHARLIE HEBDO Imaginaries of Freedom and Control Edited by Alessandro Zagato

The Event of Charlie Hebdo Imaginaries of Freedom and Control

k Edited by

Alessandro Zagato

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Paperback edition published in 2015 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2015 Berghahn Books All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any infor­ mation storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The event of Charlie Hebdo : imaginaries of freedom and control / edited by Alessandro Zagato. pages cm. — (Critical interventions : a forum for social analysis) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-78533-075-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 9781-78533-076-6 (ebook) 1. Terrorism—Social aspects—France. 2. Charlie hebdo. 3. Social conflict—France. 4. Political violence—France. 5. Freedom of the press—Social aspects—France. I. Zagato, Alessandro, editor. HV6433.F7E94 2015 363.325'907057220944361—dc23

2015022974

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Contents Introduction: The Event of Charlie Hebdo— Imaginaries of Freedom and Control Bjørn Enge Bertelsen and Alessandro Zagato 1 The Barbariat and Democratic Tolerance Knut Rio 12 Charlie Hebdo: The West and the Sacred Axel Rudi 25 The Thoughtcrimes of an Eight-Year-Old Maria Dyveke Styve 36 Imaginaries of Violence and Surrogates for Politics Alessandro Zagato 43 Where Were You, Charlie? Contesting Voices of Political Activism in the Wake of a Tragedy Mari Hanssen Korsbrekke 56

vi

Contents

Moral, All-Too Moral: Satire, Morality, and Charlie Hebdo Jacob Hjortsberg 67 On Blasphemy: The Paradoxes of Protecting and Mocking God Theodoros Rakopoulos 83 Afterword: When Is a Joke Not a Joke? The Paradox of Egalitarianism Bruce Kapferer 93

Introduction The Event of Charlie Hebdo—Imaginaries of Freedom and Control

k Bjørn Enge Bertelsen and Alessandro Zagato

It’s about a guy falling off the fiftieth floor of a skyscraper. On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good … So far so good … How you fall doesn’t matter. It’s how you land.

This is what a background voice says in the initial scene of the 1995 French film La Haine (Hate), directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. In the last scene, when Hubert (one of the protagonists, a migrant background young man from the banlieues, the multi-ethnic Parisian suburbs) and a policeman deliberately point guns at each other, the same sentence is repeated but with a slight modification, where the subject ‘guy’ is replaced with ‘society’: “It’s about a society in free fall.” Kassowitz’s imagery and words evoke a scenario of urgency, desperation, and passive, almost suicidal—certainly nihilistic—acceptance of the impending final outcome. They perfectly encompass the sense one gets when witnessing events such as the 7 January 2015 attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris

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and the subsequent attacks that took place in the Île-deFrance region. The figure of the fall and imminent impact represents the current zeitgeist and the sense of finitude shaping it. It points to a present that “from whatever angle you approach it … offers no way out” (Invisible Committee 2007) and where, as has been repeated by many, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,”1 the totalizing economic and social system that is leading the planet to environmental and social catastrophe. One can assume that a similar desperate feeling of closure, lack of hope, and agency led a group of men in their twenties, who had grown up in the banlieues, to get involved in a violent and suicidal mission such as that performed in Paris early this year. Beyond the crude materiality of their act, which is not the main point of analysis in this volume, some critical questions need to be considered. Symbolically, who or what was the target of those bullets? How did Charlie Hebdo come to represent absolute evil in the eyes of the attackers—an enemy that needed to be eliminated even at the cost of taking human life? What led so many people to identify immediately and simultaneously with the victims of the shootings and the value of freedom of speech, which the journal all of a sudden seemed to fully embody? Which imaginaries has this violent occurrence invigorated or reactivated? And, finally, what do the political and state responses tell us about current social orders in France and beyond? Inspired by such questions, the present volume aims primarily to be a contribution and a critical response to the enormous and varied amount of discussion that this violent and spectacular event has ignited among citizens and intellectuals from around Europe and beyond. Our aim here is not to propose an alternative or more detailed reconstruction of what occurred during the attacks but to

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analyze the effects that they have had in various spheres of social life, including politics, the state, ideology, collective imaginaries, the media, and education, among others. We start from the observation that the events being popularly attributed to Charlie Hebdo go beyond the sensationalist headlines of the mainstream media, transcend the spatial confines of nation-states, and lend themselves to an ever-expanding number of mutating discursive formations. In our view (and following Mari Korsbrekke‘s argument in her article), more than representing a historical rupture—the emergence of something novel or to some extent separated from current historical conditions and themes—the shootings constitute an intensification of current processes. It is a moment in which patterns of social life become more evident as well as easily identifiable and analyzable. In the first place, the Charlie Hebdo event has shed light on the present evolution and consolidation of contemporary processes concerning statehood (including related ideological formations) and politics. Today, the most manifest feature of the state—beyond the ruthless demolition of its democratic functions—is perhaps its militaristic nature and ever-growing warmongering tendencies. Present-day accelerated processes of external and internal militarization are reflected in the proliferation of new war zones in many areas of the planet, in particular since the declaration of ‘infinite war’ by the Bush administration. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, military expenses have increased rapidly in areas like Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East where “[a] combination of high oil prices until the latter part of 2014 and numerous regional conflicts contributed to rising military expenditure in several of the major spending countries in these regions” (SIPRI 2015).

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Campaigns of extermination conducted over the last two decades in the name of peace continue as low-intensity warfare, even after they are declared terminated and various forms of peace are formally declared at official levels. The feeling is that the goal of these activities is to turn societies into a sort of manageable chaos. In cases like Iraq (since 1990), Afghanistan (since 2001), Libya (since 2011), and Syria (since 2011), among other countries, war seems to be aimed at destroying “any cohesiveness of the state, and to replace it with a combination of direct military occupation and economic corruption. As the philosopher Alain Badiou has recently argued in a lecture at the University of Bologna, the objective of … military intervention is to create plebeian masses everywhere deprived of any capacity of collective cohesion” (Pozzana and Russo 2005: 208). Governments and their military apparatuses seem, in other words, to be implementing violent fragmenting and atomizing processes aimed at the eradication of any collective political capacity of a society. Nearly 10 years ago, Claudia Pozzana and Alessandro Russo (2005: 208) observed that Western military interventionism is diverging substantially from previous forms of imperialism in that now its aim is “the dislocation and disarticulation of the state’s civil functions … [T]he present military campaigns are only the first steps in a plan to fully militarize the state.” In light of current worldwide developments, their remarks are revealed to have been truthful. Indeed, the evolution of war they were analyzing is now mirrored in the internal militarization of states on a global scale, including intense policing practices that increasingly resemble low-intensity warfare. Crucial here is that, following the terror attacks of September 2001, some of the most powerful countries in the world officially elevated the threat of terrorism and the fight against it as a

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priority in their global agendas. Constructed as a spectral and virtually ubiquitous (internal and external) threat, the ghost of Islamic terrorism has produced ideas of infinite and pre-emptive war. It has served as the pretext for the introduction of special laws and new security measures, the increase and diversification of military and policing expenditures, and the launch of new wars, especially in North Africa and the Middle East. In his article, Axel Rudi argues that the current militarization of Paris, in particular of the multi-ethnic banlieues circumscribing the political and commercial urban core of the capital, may be seen as integral to such a reconfiguration. In some circumstances military strategies and actions are applied to situations that are close to civil war, as in the case of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, which is an attempt to rebuild the black liberation movement in response to state racism and extrajudicial killings of Afro-American people by police and vigilantes. In other cases, militarization is implemented as a means to protect European borders and prevent African migrants and refugees from crossing them. The recent massacres of migrants in Mediterranean waters constitute the outcome of the militaristic and legalistic approaches implemented by the European Union. Current patterns of state action and evolution apply not only to the state’s most basic and obvious apparatus: the military/police. They also shape other dimensions of statehood that Bruce Kapferer (2010) has put together under the idea of ‘the corporate state’. On the one hand, the economic logic has become “ontologically foundational, permeating all social and political relations” (ibid.: 127). To live experiences that do not follow an underlying economic logic is becoming increasingly rare in personal spheres as well—to the point that authors like John Holloway (2010) see anti-capitalism as starting as resistance

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of the ‘human’ against the inhumanity of the capitalist colonization of the most intimate aspects of life. In the face of the above reflections, one could read the pure act that the attack on Charlie Hebdo represents as somehow mimicking and reproducing state-defined categories (e.g., the clash of civilizations) and the patterns of militarization that they ideologically support. But this act can also be seen as a desperate attempt to affirm a principle different from the overwhelming economic logic, as well as a rupture with that logic. Alessandro Zagato argues in his article that the attack can be viewed as a surrogate for a new politics of emancipation that has not yet been found. Depoliticization and the rule of money abandon the younger generations to a sense of disorientation that can be fulfilled by naturalized identitarian views, providing a sense of belonging and a way out of oppression and marginalization. Added to this, the corporate state constantly implements preventive strategies aimed at coping with the eventual uprising of forms of resistance capable of destabilizing its order and threatening its legitimacy. Kapferer (2010: 132) argues that “the activity of the agents and agencies of the state in social production and the creation of its moral order—and in varying degrees the involvement of the citizenry—can be seen as a major strategy for addressing forces that may challenge or resist the state.” However, in view of events such as those we are dealing with in this volume, one could also argue that this production of a moral order and related strategies of counterinsurgency are in turn decisive in constructing the state’s own enemy. Indeed, one outcome of Western military interventionism in the Middle East has been the creation and expansion of terrorist organizations such as ISIS, while many violent forms of protest in European cities over the last decades have mirrored the structural forms

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of racist, classist, and symbolic violence—“a violence of the category,” as Kapferer (ibid.: 133) puts it—that shape contemporary statehood. In this respect, the wordless destruction that revolts such as the banlieue uprisings of 2005 and the London riots of 2011 displayed are the expression of needs and desires that are absolutely incompatible with the current social order. These rioters seemed to have no negotiable vindication to express—just pure antagonism. Of course, such events do not constitute an absolute novelty: as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2009: 234) highlight, jacqueries—organized rebellions “based on indignation”— have cyclically returned, “punctuating modern history” (ibid.: 237).2 However, what is striking about the youth riots that have occurred over the past two decades is the institutional loneliness of the perpetrators—that is, the absence of any ties with political organizations. Such a politics of insularity or, perhaps better, such an insularization of politics sheds light on the fact that official politics is increasingly detached from the reality of ordinary people, reduced to a sterile competition for state power, and highly colonized by economic logics. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Badiou has argued that “political proposals apart from the ruling consensus—proposals of a revolutionary and universal nature, able to organise these young people around an active, solid, rational political conviction—are disastrously weak, internationally” (see Watson 2015). Echoing the sterility of current political approaches, civil society’s response to the attacks on Charlie Hebdo have followed a narrowly identitarian logic, counterposing European identity, based on Western exceptionalism and Enlightenment symbols, to Muslim fanaticism, as Axel Rudi’s and Knut Rio’s contributions to this volume clearly highlight. Even the mainstream leftwing journal La Libération, on the morning of 8 January,

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had “La France debout” (France Stands) as a headline—a slogan that was used historically by several French governments with nationalist and populist purposes (see Rio’s article). This popular response perfectly overlapped that of the state: the government denounced the “barbarity” (in President François Hollande’s words) of the act, appealed for national unity, and encouraged people to come together en masse and demonstrate—a very curious occurrence in a society that values freedom of expression. In his article, Jacob Hjortsberg interprets this state response as a massive superego spectacle in which everyone is called on to identify as a particular kind of moral subject (“I am Charlie”), apparently to defend something like satire, which is meaningful only as long as it refuses to be moral. At the level of ideology, the attacks on Charlie Hebdo have touched upon multiple imaginaries of freedom that are integral to Western liberal democracy and its egalitarian grounds. These include, for instance, �freedom of speech and secularity, with blasphemy constituting one of modernity’s great paradoxes, as Theodoros Rakopoulos’s article illustrates. However, the invocation of such freedoms is also frequently used as a narrative device to provide a sense of identity, as well as to demonize those who are perceived as not conforming to such imaginaries (e.g., an observant Muslim family in Paris). In some cases, they are made into tools of racism, bigotry, and exclusion, as in 2011 when ideas of free speech were called upon by Northern American Islamophobic groups campaigning to stop the television network Al Jazeera from expanding in the United States (Pilkington 2015). From what is written above, it should be clear that we do not see the Paris attacks as erupting from an absolute void, as the media spectacularization of the Charlie Hebdo event may suggest. Such mainstream narrative renditions often seem to focus strictly on what Slavoj Žižek (2008:

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2) has defined as “subjective violence,” that is, violence “experienced as such against the background of a nonviolent zero level” and perceived as “a perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peaceful state of things.” Seemingly, as if out of nowhere, there was an unexpected eruption of atrocity that threatened not only Paris but also France and ‘the West’. We do not see the attacks solely as expressing the ubiquitous and immanent threat from Islamic terrorism. Rather, we believe that they must also be understood against the background of a situation where racism and symbolic (structural) violence toward those who are considered non-European are widespread and historically rooted. In her article, Maria Styve illustrates how the long shadows of racialized and imperial politics (colonialism, for short) can help us to understand the defiance toward—or at least the non-total compliance with—the “Je suis Charlie” script that was implemented in French schools after the attacks. A case in point is that the perpetrators were French citizens, born and raised in the Parisian banlieues. The fact that they chose to act as they did raises important questions about their motivations and the process of radicalization that they had undergone. Perhaps the fact that some of them were of Algerian descent can help us to relate their action to French colonization and the anticolonial struggle, whose effects, we assert, are far from being over in France.

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. His research focuses on politics, state formation, violence, poverty, and rural-urban connections, based mostly on long-standing fieldwork in Mozambique. He regularly publishes in journals, and he co-edited Crisis of the State:

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War and Social Upheaval (2012, with Bruce Kapferer) and Navigating Colonial Orders: Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania (2015, with Kirsten Alsaker Kjerland). His monograph Violent Becomings: State Formation, Culture, and Power in Mozambique will be published in 2016. Alessandro Zagato is a postdoctoral researcher in the Egal­ itarianism Project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), within the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He is currently developing a research project on the interplay between politics and aesthetics in indigenous movements of the south of Mexico. He recently edited an issue of Rufián Revista (2014) on aesthetics and autonomy in the Zapatista movement and published a chapter on the Occupy movement in the collection Cyborg Subjects: Discourses on Digital Culture (2013).

Notes 1. “Introduction: Present Tense, Future Conditional,” Turbulence 4 (2008): 3. 2. See Eric Hobsbawm ([1959] 1965) for a similar argument about such incidents of rebellion.

References Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric. [1959] 1965. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries. New York: W. W. Norton. Holloway, John. 2010. Crack Capitalism. New York: Pluto Press. Invisible Committee. 2007. “The Coming Insurrection.” https:// tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/.

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Kapferer, Bruce. 2010. “The Aporia of Power: Crisis and the Emergence of the Corporate State.” Social Analysis 54 (1): 125–151. Pilkington, Ed. 2015. “Texas Attack Shows How US Protects Free Speech—No Matter How Offensive.” Guardian, 6 May. http:// www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/06/texas-shootings -free-speech-constitution. Pozzana, Claudia, and Alessandro Russo. 2005. “After the Invasion of Iraq.” Positions 13 (1): 205–214. SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute). 2015. SIPRI Yearbook 2015. Oxford: Oxford University Press, on behalf of SIPRI. Watson, Mike. 2015. “The Red Flag and the Tricolore by Alain Badiou.” Verso Blog, 3 February. http://www.versobooks.com/ blogs/1833-the-red-flag-and-the-tricolore-by-alain-badiou. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books.

The Barbariat and Democratic Tolerance

k Knut Rio

In what way were the Charlie Hebdo shootings an event? One aspect here is the point made by Marshall Sahlins (1991: 81–82) that a happening becomes an event only when totalized, appropriated, and domesticated in a systematic way by the dominant forces. In this sense, the attack and the public response that followed it were turned into an event inside the dominant narrative of the French nation and its belief in human liberties—an event that afterward supported the new constitution of this narrative. Only hours after the shootings on 7 January 2015, people in Paris began to gather in the streets. La Libération, one of the major French newspapers, reported that, by six o’clock in the afternoon, 35,000 people had assembled in the Place de la République under the statue of Marianne, the national symbol of revolutionary freedom and the republic itself. Over the next couple of days, it is estimated that several million Parisians assembled as an expression of solidarity, carrying banners that read “Against Hatred and Barbarism.” At the speed of light, the happening was elevated from being an attack on members of a controversial magazine to an event of a much larger magnitude—an attack on the basic human right to freedom of speech, on

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‘the people’, on the entire ‘free world’. Other popular uprisings drew support from the response to this event, and the slogan for the solidarity movement—“Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie)—became a global web buzz. On the morning of 8 January, La Libération had “La France debout” (France Stands) as a headline next to a photograph of the massive crowds in the streets of Paris. Already in the first pages of this influential French newspaper, the event was being placed in relation to the people and the republic. The slogan “Debout la France” (France Is Standing) is well-known to the French. It has been invoked on several occasions as a populist and nationalist slogan, going back to the Charles de Gaulle era (as “Debout la République”) and the upholding of French imperial greatness and colonial supremacy. It was used in Jacques Chirac’s campaign for presidency in 1995 and more recently by the nationalist party Debout la France, which was founded in 1999 and sees itself as a Gaull­ist party. On the day after the shootings, both the special operations of the National Gendarmerie and the Force d’Intervention de la Police nationale were let loose in the streets all across France. On 9 January, La Libération reported that a total of 88,000 police and gendarmes had been mobilized—10,000 in the Île-de-France region, where the manhunt played out, and the rest in the other regions of France. It is clear that this was a state of emergency, and these special forces trained for the purpose of countering terrorism were making many arrests in all parts of the country. By that morning, 400 people had already been apprehended on exceptional charges related to terrorism (La Libération, 9 January, 2–3). For the duration of these next several days, the people of France, in a celebration of the nation and state, joined with this massive police force, taking part in a shared response to the

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perceived attack on French human liberties. The event also signaled a particular form of aggression and feeling of necessary popular mobilization. But a mobilization against what? In order to respond to this, we first need to abandon the domestication of this event. The notion that an event is an ideological construction of a dominant discourse also implies that it hides from us certain aspects of its foundations. In its appropriating motion, the event becomes a lie, so to speak, since the event now uses the happening for realizing its own narrative about the world. In the Charlie Hebdo event, this narrative was about freedom of expression, international terrorism, and Islamic fundamentalism, and in the days and weeks after the shootings, we could follow how this narrative of the event sparked massive emotions and further violence. People all over Europe joined hands in their aggression, and people all over the region stood up to support Charlie with typical statements about how human liberties had been much fought over and that one should continue to fight for them. This meant from the first instance that people’s emotional responses tended toward warfare, protest, and even martyrdom: “I will fight with my life for your right to say it.” The point in this article is that we should look beyond this event as it was constructed in the contemporary EuroAmerican setting and instead reconstitute it as a happening within a long and complex history of colonial warfare, race, and Manichaean divisions inside the post-colonial world. This not only brings back into view the French nation and its internal problems of managing its colonies in North Africa, but also the more recent history of combined NATO and UN warfare in the Middle East in which the notion of barbarie (barbarism) has been upheld as the mark of the enemy.

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Post-colonial Freedom and Barbarity On 8 January, France’s minister of the interior, Bernard Cazeneuve, said in a press release: “Je veux appeler les Français à rester unis et soudés contre la violence barbare des terroristes. Nous saurons leur démonter par notre sangfroid que nous n’avons pas peur” (I appeal to the French to stand welded together against the barbaric violence of the terrorists. We shall demonstrate that we are untouched and fearless) (La Libération, 9 January, 2–3; my translation). It is perhaps worth noting that two of the attackers, the Kouachi brothers, were of Algerian origin. Statements made by French citizens and Cazeneuve made me think of the film The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo 1966), which describes the events of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). In the segregated city of Algiers, the white French Pieds-Noirs are shown to lead a cosmopolitan life in Continental-style quarters, while the Arab population are more or less imprisoned in the Casbah quarters. The hatred and disgust for the rebels expressed in the film take similar forms these days in Paris. In one of the scenes, we become aware of the violence of the average French citizens in the street, who perceive as uncanny and potentially threatening the presence of the people who used to be their loyal, docile servants. As in Paris, the colonial insurgency in Algiers was aimed at places dedicated to the enjoyment of French liberties: the terrorist bombs in 1956 were placed at cafés and an Air France terminal. Also in Algiers, the reaction of the paramilitary forces was to strike back with devastating power, using the same vocabulary of fighting the barbarie. The event of Charlie Hebdo is in this sense not a unique happening, not a break with the past. Rather, it is a continuing reappearance of the systemic conflicts built into French colonialist relations. The Arabs now living in Paris

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are continually reliving a situation that derives from the violent occupation of Algeria and the Algerian War. Part of the whole problem of the Charlie event is that France was always in denial of this history. Even Alexis de Tocqueville—an early thinker who was, in principle, sharply critical of the developments of slavery, racism, and totalitarian democracy in the settler colonies—failed to address the inhuman violence that took place in Algeria during his visits in the 1830s. Systematic razzia (raids) that burned harvests, destroyed food, and killed women, children, and unarmed men were the order of the day in Algeria during his visit. Tocqueville directed his analytical clarity instead toward a critique of Algerian culture. He was interested in the structure of Algerian houses, which typically did not open to the street but had inner courts. He saw this arrangement as symptomatic of little public life, no personal anonymity, and the effect of religious tyranny. In short, Algerians did not appear to value the French liberties, and this became Tocqueville’s excuse for supporting the colonial regime (see Richter 1963: 377). This approach resonated well with the French Army in their war on the Casbah quarters in 1960, and it continues to resonate today in the way that the Paris authorities and media see the organization of the Arab populations in the banlieue, or suburbs. The inferior race is closed off to itself in buildings and clothing: its members seem to be mystified by a tyranny of religion and do not wish to appear as public individuals. The war on this enclosed barbaric figure started immediately in the moment of colonization and continues up to the present. Only now, the war has become internal to the national territory itself, and the problem of the colonies has most pressingly been transported into the suburbs of Paris (Fassin 2013: 44–45). Here, a large population descending from the former colonies take up a special form of enclosed

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space. Rather than the precariat, perhaps we might call them the barbariat. Not only do they have very limited access to labor and legitimate wealth, they are also seen as a potential source of barbarian eruptions of violence and insecurity. The concept of barbarity derives from the Latin barbaria (foreign country) and dates back several millennia as a reference to aliens with unknown languages. For the ancient Greeks and in the Roman Empire, the term was used for all sorts of people surrounding their territories: Germanic-speaking tribes, such as the Goths, Huns, or Vandals to the north; North African tribes like the Berbers and Arabs to the south; and the Byzantine Empire to the east. One might say that much of this primordial meaning has stuck to the concept of the alien—an alter human being who is wild, undomesticated, illiterate, violent, and unpredictable. But it has also been remarked by historians that whereas the barbarians in the Roman Empire were smoothly incorporated into Roman territory and were slowly taking over (Goffart 1980), this has not been the case with the integration of barbarians of the former European colonies into Europe. In France, this seems deeply significant as a description of the post-colonial enclaves in the Paris suburbs. Perhaps the recent event indicates that ‘barbaric’ is a more suitable term for this population and their terrorism than other aspects of their social life, such as, for instance, Islam. The colonized people are barbarians; it is merely an accident that they are Muslims, it seems. The minister of the interior’s expression, “la violence barbare,” is deeply entrenched in the relation between the European colonial powers and their North African colonial subjects (see also Fanon 1967), and it is perhaps the irony of European history that young people of the Paris suburbs who choose to reinvent their Muslim identity

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are instead seen as upholding a barbarian heritage. It becomes a truism that the barbariat is barbarian—as one essentialism leads to another. Minister Cazeneuve’s statement was backed up by a headline in La Libération (8 January, 2), which read “A la poursuite de la barbarie” (In Pursuit of Barbarity). The article played on the double persecution of the barbariat that was taking place—the manhunt by the police for the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly and his wife, but also the many random and violent Islamophobic attacks that were being committed against French citizens across the country. Several Muslims of North African appearance were killed, even though they were completely unrelated to the event, and a man from Morocco was stabbed 17 times (Le Monde, 8 January, 4).

Charlie Hebdo and Democratic Tolerance Let us take a couple of steps back and look at the role that the Charlie Hebdo magazine played in this tension between the barbariat and the French liberties. We note that in 2006 Charlie Hebdo sold 500,000 copies of the famous issue with the cartoon of a weeping Muhammad stating “C’est dur d’être aimé par des cons” (It’s Hard Being Loved by Jerks). For a journal that normally sold copies in the tens of thousands, this was a step up to a different league of international publishing. From random nonsense and obscene mockery of politicians and celebrities, it suddenly touched on something of a whole other order: an indefinable terrain of massive popular interest, an intimation of danger, of stepping across a line. It seemed that this was what the masses longed for—the desecration of the one thing that the barbarians held especially sacred: Muhammad.

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I do not think it was a coincidence that this best-selling issue came at the climax of the staged drama of the Iraq War, only months after the execution of Saddam Hussein in December 2006. The media covered Hussein’s public humiliation closely, as the former leader was dragged around in the streets to show off the victory of the Western war machine. The spectacles of tearing down his statue and then his hanging were major media events, celebrating the much called for victory of the Iraq War—a war that probably killed over 100,000 Iraqi civilians and also created a very visible media imprint. Following the Abu Ghraib atrocities of 2003, these events were a steppingstone toward a new media imagery of the obscene, another milestone of humiliation, desecration, and ridicule as a marked visualization and documentarization of a new world order. We have now begun to realize that this situation of war has become permanent—and in this sense the Paris killings mark another steppingstone. The imagery of the Charlie Hebdo drawings, on the one hand, and the shootings as an attack in a number of attacks on the symbolic centers of Western power, on the other, add significantly to a warfare of the obscene. The flirtation with death and danger that the cartoons represent for their audience is an important component in this war. What we see playing out in these events is the wider ramification of a war that has mostly been going on in territories other than our own. The drawings have gained a massive popular interest exactly because of a particular form of temptation to pull this conflict closer, a manifestation of fear-desire, a perverse sadomasochistic fascination with playing not only with the danger of terrorism but also with domination and subjection. This was brought to us in the widespread images from Abu Ghraib and the hanging of Saddam Hussein and has continued in the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo.

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Humor is no doubt at its best when someone is humiliated. And mockery is most effective when it ridicules someone who is either up or down from ourselves. The most funny celebrity jokes are perhaps about Prince Charles, the Pope, or Michael Jackson. But we also laugh a lot at minorities: the Sami here in Norway, the Jews, the Muslims, the multi-handicapped, and so on. In this sense, comedy is about separating, and mostly it is about separating the majority from the minorities, the rich and beautiful from the middle classes, the miserable from the successful. In so doing, mockery or satire becomes a major technology of marginalization. We also need to add here that comedians have taken up a very particular position in our society in recent decades. Stand-up comedians, comedy series on television and radio, and YouTube videos account for much of our entertainment—and the public loves to get a good laugh. Comedians often have deeply seated humanist and secularist values, yet there is aggression in their humanism, especially toward people who take things too seriously. For instance, a comedian’s response to a woman wearing a nikab will be to undress her and make her look like a hooker. Targeting Catholics for their celibacy and ban on condoms and abortion, comedians portray them as fucking young boys and breeding like rabbits. This merciless aggression toward what some people find valuable has become routine in everyday television and radio. This is for me the great paradox of democratic humanism: although it upholds tolerance as a primary value, it does not tolerate non-humanism. This is a long stretch away from its own ideals. As described by Herbert Marcuse (1965), ‘pure tolerance’ would imply a completely equal society wherein everyone could tolerate everyone else on equal grounds. This society we have not yet seen. Pure tolerance would make judgments and arguments based

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on rational thinking and would always work from the bottom up, as a liberating movement against the oppression of those who hold the tools of legitimate violence. This is what the comedians imagine they are doing in their selfrepresentation. Instead, they become vehicles for legitimate violence and often deliver its first punch, standing in the front line of a constant democratic eradication of values other than those of the majoritarian hegemony. In terms of values, comedians are always ‘anti-’. Perhaps the great invention of the twentieth century was that art became a means to challenge established views on representation and truth. What we are starting to see in the twenty-first century is the role of comedians in regulating, neutralizing, and attacking values. The only value that remains is the value of making fun of other values. This is arguably the paramount value of the warring Western world against its former colonized subjects, and its own sacrality is continually demonstrated through these acts of war themselves. In the situation of constant warfare, Euro-American society should be seen as perpetuating war machinery in all sorts of aspects. Comedy, schooling, and military service are parts of this machine, which perhaps goes all the way to include aspects of sexuality and the eroticization of domination (think about the immense popularity of the 2015 film Fifty Shades of Grey, which features a sadomasochistic relationship). In his essay on what he calls ‘repressive tolerance’, Marcuse (1965) has a powerful argument about the weight of the majority in the question of values. He observes how the democratic argument for abstract tolerance becomes indifferent to values: “the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one,” becoming a “toleration of sense and nonsense” (ibid.: 94). This in the end means the invalidation of the democratic process itself. Basically,

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the media and new technologies work to force people to think in certain directions, thus invalidating democracy by the “blocking of effective dissent” through streamlining language itself into a “public language” (ibid.: 95). In this language, contradictions and disagreements are canceled out since the contrary standpoint is always determined by the initial standpoint. The antithesis of ‘preparing for war’ and ‘working for peace’ in the media machinery and political rhetoric becomes “preparing for war is working for peace” (ibid.: 96). Comedy and satire are important vehicles for aggression and marginalization because they contribute in a big way to “obliterat[ing] the difference between true and false, information and indoctrination, right and wrong” (ibid.: 97). In this form of democratic tolerance, the difference between what is right and what is wrong can no longer be kept within view. Marcuse ends his essay on the note that “if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn …, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War” (ibid.: 109).

Conclusion What came to me as a surprise after the Charlie Hebdo shootings was the immediate aggression in people’s attitudes, even as remote from Paris as Bergen. One of our colleagues in media studies stated to a newspaper that the freedom of expression had taken a lot of sacrifices and that he would stand up to defend this right to his death. War is already implied in such emotional responses and arguments. It is as if people are taking part in an organic totality of an imagined community of revolutionary fighters: they identify with the first revolutionaries and all other martyrs (to invoke a much-used concept) whose goal is the achievement of human liberties. These are the

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emotions that the narrative of the Charlie Hebdo event has produced. The evocation of war is immediate, and we are all in the middle of it. I have argued that we need to liberate ourselves from this narrative of the event. The concept of democratic tolerance not only surrounds us with warfare in the mass media (e.g., films that feature a Hobbesian future like The Road or The Book of Eli, television series of primordial merciless warfare like Game of Thrones, or pop music like Nico & Vinz’s “When the Day Comes”), but also has reduced our tolerance for other values, often resulting in violent public ridicule. In our study of the happening of the Charlie Hebdo event, we need to understand it as assembling, extending, and innovating upon the imaginaries of the ongoing war—a war that has entered into the private domain and is becoming more and more a concern of civil society.

Knut Rio is a Professor of Anthropology at the University Museum of Bergen. His research has concerned Melanesian anthropology and topics such as gift exchange, hierarchy and egalitarianism, and the colonial history of the Pacific, as well as witchcraft, divination, and sacrifice. He is the author of The Power of Perspective: Social Ontology and Agency on Ambrym Island, Vanuatu (2007) and co-editor of Hierarchy: Persistence and Transformation in Social Formations (2009, with Olaf H. Smedal), Made in Oceania: Social Movements, Cultural Heritage and the State in the Pacific (2011, with Edvard Hviding), and The Arts of Government: Crime, Christianity and Policing in Melanesia (2011, with Andrew Lattas).

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References Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. London: Penguin Books. Fassin, Didier. 2013. Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing. Trans. Rachel Gomme. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goffart, Walter A. 1980. Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 418–584: The Techniques of Accommodation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1965. “Repressive Tolerance.” Pp. 81–123 in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, ed. Robert P. Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse. Boston: Beacon Press. Pontecorvo, Gillo, dir. 1966. The Battle of Algiers. Film, 121 min., Rialto Pictures. Richter, Melvin. 1963. “Tocqueville on Algeria.” Review of Politics 25, no. 3: 362–398. Sahlins, Marshall. 1991. “The Return of the Event, Again.” Pp. 37–99 in Clio in Oceania: Toward a Historical Anthropology, ed. Aletta Biersack. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Charlie Hebdo The West and the Sacred

k Axel Rudi

In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo shootings, people rallied together in huge demonstrations, spreading the hashtag “#JeSuisCharlie” (I am Charlie) throughout France and the world. In France alone, the New York Times estimated that 3.7 million people attended the solidarity demonstration on 8 January (Alderman and Bilefsky 2015). Cartoonists from many different countries drew comics in support of those killed, international writers defended the magazine, and a plethora of politicians condemned the attacks worldwide, all affirming the global reach of the struggle for freedom of speech. Although these were seemingly befitting reactions, and the responses appeared innocuous enough, we should consider why the reactions transpired as they did and the phenomena that came out of the aftermath. We may even ask why the Charlie Hebdo killings became an event at all. Did they really represent such an anomalous attack on free expression? This might sound like a strange question, easily refuted by the universal declaration that “freedom of speech had been attacked.” We should, however, not find this argument satisfactory. Suppressing journalists for political purposes is not an unfamiliar practice, yet it has not previously

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garnered the same public outrage. Indeed, at the solidarity demonstration orchestrated by the world leaders, a host of perpetrators of this very offense were present and linking arms: Prime Minister Davutog˘lu of Turkey, a country which has the highest number of incarcerated journalists in the world (Greenslade 2013); Prime Minister Cerar of Slovenia, who condemned a blogger to a six-month prison sentence for ‘defamation’ (Reporters Without Borders 2013a); and Prime Minister Cameron of the UK, whose government destroyed documents provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden and threatened legal action (Reporters Without Borders 2013b). In response to this argument, someone might claim that in the case of Charlie Hebdo “innocent people died expressing their opinion” and that this would suffice to cause a public outcry. But again, this is not a new phenomenon and has not previously fomented such popular mobilization. In 1999, NATO bombed the Serbian state television headquarters, killing 16 journalists (Chomsky 2015), and was lauded for doing so in several international newspapers. In 2001, the US bombed Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul (BBC 2001), and in 2003 the US repeated the event, this time in Baghdad, killing a journalist and a staff member (BBC 2003). A memo leaked from the British government in 2005 reveals that George W. Bush and Tony Blair had a direct and overt conversation about the benefits of bombing Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Qatar, where more than 1,000 people were working (Khanfar 2010). Recently, Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, who linked arms at the world leader demonstration, was responsible for the murder of 17 journalists in Gaza (David 2014). If people were truly enraged that the universal right to free speech had been suppressed, leaving innocent people dead in its wake, we may ask why there was no outrage in the European countries or the US concerning these

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other events. This seems to indicate that there are other processes at work. I would contend that one of the reasons why Charlie Hebdo garnered so much public attention was not because of its suppression of the universal right to freedom of speech, but because the Charlie Hebdo killings defiled the First World privilege and Eurocentric sentiments behind the concept of freedom of speech. It was not transgressing against freedom of speech that riled people, but rather transgressing against what freedom of speech represented: the European identity based on Western exceptionalism and Enlightenment symbols. Several facts speak to this argument. After the Charlie Hebdo killings, along with “Je suis Charlie,” people tweeted variations of Voltaire’s supposed quote: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” (Dugdale 2015), indicating that denigrating religious iconography falls within the Enlightenment domain of free expression. However, contrary to popular belief, the quotation is misattributed and actually derives from a British biographer, Evelyn Hall, who paradoxically sought to characterize Voltaire’s attitude toward religion. Furthermore, it is doubtful whether Voltaire himself would consider his “Treatise on Tolerance” as having any bearing on the current discussion, since ridicule for him should always serve in conjunction with—and be secondary to—reasoned argumentation in a strong public sphere (Fitzpatrick 2000: 53). As Voltaire (1994: 166) himself states: “The great means to reduce the number of fanatics, if any remain, is to submit that disease of the mind to the treatment of reason, which slowly, but infallibly, enlightens men. Reason is gentle and humane.” This may indicate to us that a thorough knowledge of how Voltaire and the Enlightenment relate to freedom of speech is unnecessary to claim him as a symbolic defender of Charlie Hebdo.

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Nevertheless, if we take seriously the popular interpretation of the Enlightenment credo—that we should defame and disparage everything that demands reverence and “defend to our death our right to do so”—we may ask ourselves what would be a more appropriate way of honoring the cartoonists than mocking their deaths. This would celebrate their project and follow directly in their footsteps, echoing their mockery in 2013 of the protestors in Cairo, where more than 1,000 people were massacred. Although this would mirror the universal message of Charlie Hebdo (i.e., nothing is sacred and everything can be made fun of), for most people this would immediately stir up feelings of transgression and taboo. In fact, the French government, apparently oblivious to the irony, immediately started detaining people who made satirical gibes directed at the Charlie Hebdo event, amounting to at least 69 arrests in the first week, including a 16-year-old boy (Abunimah 2015). To me, this uncritical and selective espousing of the Enlightenment seems to indicate a popular affirmation of its symbolic qualities rather than a concern with freedom of expression’s facticity or content. After the Charlie Hebdo shootings, people throughout Europe and the West felt that they, too, had been attacked; the symbolic ideal of freedom of speech, which bolsters the unique European identity, had been assaulted, unrelated to the injustices suffered by others. The shootings did not become an event because of defiled universal rights, but rather because they violated a particular Europeanist ideology, posing as universal. It was ‘our’ people who had been assaulted by the ‘others’. We may thus argue that behind the Enlightenment ethos, propounded as expelling superstition and universalizing reason, particularist sacrality is still at play. When the sacred is transgressed against, as anthropologists will tell us, this necessitates affective response. The

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wrath and revanchism felt by many people all over the Western world sought outlets that fit the image of the Muslim ‘other’. Within five days of the Charlie Hebdo event, 26 mosques had been attacked (Stone 2015). In Le Mans a mosque was assaulted with grenades, in Port-la-Nouvelle a mosque was shot at, and in Villefranche-sur-Saône a kebab shop was firebombed.1 By 20 January, there were 128 reported anti-Muslim incidents, including beatings and racist threats (McNicoll 2015). Furthermore, in Dresden the weekly anti-immigration protest surged from an estimated 18,000 participants to 25,000 (Al Jazeera America 2015). In France, support swelled for Marine Le Pen and her farright party, Front National, amounting to approximately 30 percent of the electorate. If the election were to have been held right after the attacks, some researchers estimated that she could even have taken the reins as president.2 One of the reasons for this vitriolic, affective reaction to the Charlie Hebdo shootings was that some people felt that it was not just part of the European identity that had been assaulted through violating the freedom of expression. Rather, the entire Western identity was perceived as being under siege. Among a plethora of other social media pundits, Anand Giridharadas, a New York Times columnist, tweeted that it was “[n]ot & never a war of civilizations or between them. But a war FOR civilization against groups on the other side of that line. #Charlie­ Hebdo” (see Chomsky 2015). This was echoed by the former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who argued that the attack was “war declared on civilization.”3 In a similar vein, Richard Dawkins, a public intellectual and a fervent defender of anti-theism and Western intervention, tweeted: “No, all religions are NOT equally violent. Some have never been violent, some gave it up centuries ago. One religion conspicuously didn’t,”4 implying that Islam was the odd one out in the progress of rational history.

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Charlie Hebdo became, for many people, a synecdochical beacon for the entire Eurocentric Western identity and self-understanding. The event was no longer symbolically concerned only with freedom of speech, but also with civilization, rationality, progress, and truth—the West and the ‘other’. The affect that was mobilized through the transgression of the sacred—the European Enlightenment symbols—became funneled into all other sorts of societal debates, leaving people more entrenched and invested in the question of what is French (or Western) and, more importantly, what is not. Even more disconcerting than the role played by affect in cementing Eurocentric identities was its role as political momentum, being used by those in power to gain a stronger hold over the population and, paradoxically, restrict the freedom of expression. One may argue that a process similar to what Naomi Klein (2007) describes as the ‘shock doctrine’ was implemented, but instead of relying on cataclysmic natural disasters, government control was extended by a symbolic and immaterial crisis. Floating on the effervescence of the mass mobilizations, the French government enacted a new law that actively seeks to delimit what can be said and argued concerning Charlie Hebdo and terrorism, and it is currently investigating approximately 100 people for posting unseemly remarks on Facebook and other social media (Carvajal and Cowell 2015). The French government also heralded new counter-terrorism measures, even before the counterterrorism law of 2014 had been enacted, and immediately reserved the right to shut down websites that “advocate jihad” without a court order (La Quadrature du Net 2015). Additionally, France is now on the precipice of instituting a new education reform, costing approximately 71 million euros, which will bolster “secular values” by increasing exposure to civic and moral instruction and by focusing

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on France’s Enlightenment history; new classroom exercises will include, among other things, singing “La Marseillaise” (Baume 2015). This tendency can also be seen internationally. In the UK, MI5 waited less than a day to petition the government for more lenient restrictions on surveillance (MacAskill 2015), and in the US conservative politicians called for the National Security Agency reforms to be immediately rescinded (District Sentinel 2015). All in all, we see that governments have used the affect mobilized by transgressions against Western Enlightenment symbols to extend their reach and power. Whether we can trust that these reforms will be used for the sole purpose of protecting us from danger becomes, I would argue, highly dubious when we consider the rather egregious track record of the Western nation-states with regard to preserving freedom of speech, for both their own constituents and those abroad. Perhaps it is time to revisit Herbert Marcuse’s (1965) A Critique of Pure Tolerance to enlighten ourselves about what freedom of speech and tolerance really mean under conditions of private and governmental hegemony. An established skeptic of the Enlightenment, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2005) formulated part of his concerns in the poem “Erlkönig.” In it, a man and his son ride hastily homeward on horseback through a stormy night. The boy sees and hears beings that his father cannot see and does not believe in. The son is solicited by an ill-intending ancient Elf-King, but the father pays no heed, ignoring his son’s increasingly desperate cries for help. When they finally arrive home, the boy is dead in his father’s arms. Goethe illustrates in this poem that when Man believes he has banished dogma in favor of reason, his neglect of the affective and the unrecognized sacred causes it to resurface and wield calamitous force on the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Similarly, when

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propagandists frame the Charlie Hebdo event—or indeed any event involving the ‘other’—as a struggle between Europe:Orient, freedom:terrorism, or us:them, we should, as Goethe warns us, be wary of the return of the unrecognized sacred in our thinking and of the damage this may do to ourselves and others.

Axel Rudi is pursuing a PhD at the University of Bergen in Social Anthropology as a part of the Egalitarianism Project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC). His research interests include social ecology, counter-power, anarchism, and prefigurative politics. His fieldwork focuses on how the Kurdish council movement in southern Turkey attempts to create democratic confederalism and autonomy, discursively and structurally, under conditions of Turkish rule. He received his MA from the University of Chicago.

Notes 1. “Paris Shootings Lead to Firebomb Attacks on French Mosques,” Telegraph, 8 January 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/europe/france/11332467/Paris-shootings-lead-tofirebomb-attacks-on-French-mosques.html. 2. “Le choc: Marine Le Pen à 31%!” Marianne, 29 January 2015, http://www.marianne.net/choc-marine-le-pen-30.html. 3. “Valls évoque de ‘nouvelles mesures’ pour répondre à la menace terroriste,” Le Figaro, 9 January 2015, http://www.lefigaro. fr/politique/le-scan/citations/2015/01/09/25002-20150109ARTFIG00099-valls-evoque-de-nouvelles-mesures-pour-repondre-ala-menace-terroriste.php. 4. This tweet can be found at https://twitter.com/richarddawkins/ status/552844234689372160.

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References Abunimah, Ali. 2015. “France Begins Jailing People for Ironic Comments.” Electronic Intifada, 19 January. http://electronicintifada. net/blogs/ali-abunimah/france-begins-jailing-people-ironic -comments. Alderman, Liz, and Dan Bilefsky. 2015. “Huge Show of Solidarity in Paris Against Terrorism.” New York Times, 11 January. http:// www.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/world/europe/paris-marchagainst-terror-charlie-hebdo.html. Al Jazeera America. 2015. “German Anti-Islam Protest Grows after Attacks in France.” 13 January. http://america.aljazeera.com/ articles/2015/1/13/german-anti-islamprotestgrowsafterfrance attacks.html. Baume, Maïa de la. 2015. “Paris Announces Plan to Promote Secular Values.” New York Times, 22 January. http://www.nytimes. com/2015/01/23/world/europe/charlie-hebdo-attack-leads-tochanges-in-french-schools.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0. BBC. 2001. “Al-Jazeera Kabul Offices Hit in US Raid.” 13 November. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1653887.stm. BBC. 2003. “Al-Jazeera ‘Hit by Missile.’” 8 April. http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2927527.stm. Carvajal, Doreen, and Alan Cowell. 2015. “French Rein in Speech Backing Acts of Terror.” New York Times, 15 January. http:// www.nytimes.com/2015/01/16/world/europe/french-rein-inspeech-backing-acts-of-terror.html?_r=0. Chomsky, Noam. 2015. “Paris Attacks Show Hypocrisy of West’s Outrage.” CNN, 20 January. http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/19/ opinion/charlie-hebdo-noam-chomsky. David, M. B. 2014. “These 17 Journalists Were Killed by Israel in Gaza.” CounterCurrent News, 29 August. http://countercurrentnews.com/2014/08/these-17-journalists-were-killed-by-israel -in-gaza/. District Sentinel. 2015. “After ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Attack in Paris, Senators Rush to Undermine Defense Reforms.” 7 January. https:// www.districtsentinel.com/charlie-hebdo-attack-paris-senatorsrush-undermine-defense-reforms/. Dugdale, John. 2015. “Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance Becomes Bestseller Following Paris Attacks.” Guardian, 16 January.

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http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/16/voltaire -treatise-tolerance-besteller-paris-attack. Fitzpatrick, Martin. 2000. “Toleration and the Enlightenment Movement.” Pp. 23–68 in Toleration in Enlightenment Europe, ed. Ole P. Grell and Roy Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goethe, Johann W. von. 2005. “Erlkönig.” Pp. 43–47 in Selected Poetry of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ed. David Luke. London: Penguin Books. Greenslade, Roy. 2013. “211 Journalists in World’s Jails in 2013— with Three Countries Holding Most.” Guardian, 18 December. http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2013/dec/18/ journalist-safety-turkey. Khanfar, Wadah. 2010. “They Bombed Al-Jazeera’s Reporters: Now the US Is After Our Integrity.” Guardian, 10 December. http:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/10/ al-jazeera-us-integrity-wikileaks. Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Henry Holt. La Quadrature du Net. 2015. “#CharlieHebdo: No to Securitarian Instrumentalisation.” 9 January. http://www.laquadrature.net/ en/charliehebdo-no-to-securitarian-instrumentalisation. MacAskill, Ewen. 2015. “MI5 Chief Seeks New Powers after Paris Magazine Attack.” Guardian, 8 January. http://www. theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/08/mi5-chief-charlie -hebdo-attack-paris-andrew-parker. Marcuse, Herbert. 1965. A Critique of Pure Tolerance. Ed. Robert P. Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., and Herbert Marcuse. Boston: Beacon Press. McNicoll, Tracy. 2015. “After Charlie Hebdo Attacks, French Muslims Face Increased Threats.” Daily Beast, 25 January. http:// www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/25/after-charlie-hebdoattacks-french-muslims-face-increased-threats.html. Reporters Without Borders. 2013a. “Blogger Gets Six Months in Jail for Defamation.” 16 May. http://en.rsf.org/slovenia-blogger-getssix-months-in-jail-16-05-2013,44621.html. Reporters Without Borders. 2013b. “UK Government’s Culpable Persecution of Guardian.” 20 August. http://en.rsf.org/ukgovernment-s-culpable-20-08-2013,45073.html.

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Stone, Jon. 2015. “Firebombs and Pigs Heads Thrown into Mosques as Anti-Muslim Attacks Increase after Paris Shootings.” Independent, 14 January. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ europe/firebombs-and-pigs-heads-thrown-into-mosques-as-antimuslim-attacks-increase-after-paris-shootings-9977423.html. Voltaire. 1994. A Treatise on Toleration and Other Essays. Trans. Joseph McCabe. New York: Prometheus Books.

The Thoughtcrimes of an Eight-Year-Old

k Maria Dyveke Styve

The day after the Paris shootings of 7 January 2015, a French schoolteacher opened a lesson by explaining to the children that 12 people had been killed the previous day during the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine. The teacher then asked the children, “Are you for Charlie or against?” While the fact that the question was posed to a classroom of eight-year-olds raises a number of issues, it was the words of one pupil named Ahmed that would make French headlines: “I am not Charlie. I am with the terrorists.” The boy was first sent to the headmaster, and eventually the police were contacted. Both the child and his father were taken in for questioning. According to the family’s lawyer, the child was reported to the police for “alleged apologies for terrorist acts.” Two months earlier, in November 2014, the French Parliament passed a law that criminalizes “apologies for terrorist acts.” This law is aimed at jihad recruiters and those who incite jihad acts. Even the police officer who questioned Ahmed could not see how an eight-year-old could possibly be prosecuted for such a crime. The school and the Ministry of Education later claimed that it was not the child’s words or actions

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but rather the aggressive behavior of the father that had warranted contacting the police. In a contrasting account in a later video interview, Ahmed narrates a story of verbal abuse by his teacher and headmaster after the first incident and asserts that they refused to measure his blood sugar (which was done regularly as he is diabetic). Ahmed claims that the headmaster had said to him, “Imagine if we stop giving you your insulin, you’ll die,” and that “you wish people’s death, so why wouldn’t you die too?” In the same video, the father explains that, having come to the school to check on his son’s diabetes, he was told what had happened. After questioning Ahmed himself about the incident and whether he had indeed said that he was for the terrorists, the father asked Ahmed if he understood what the word ‘terrorism’ means. While Ahmed replied no, he also explained that he was for the terrorists because of the cartoon drawing of Muhammad. Responding to his father’s request, Ahmed then apologized to the teachers and the headmaster. Nonetheless, a few days later both Ahmed and his father were taken to the police station for questioning. The family’s lawyer disputes the version of events given by the school and the Ministry of Education, as he was present during the interrogations, and asserts that the child was indeed questioned for “apologies for terrorist acts.” Taking a step back, what does it mean for school authorities to call for a police investigation in response to the statements of an eight-year-old in class? While the thousands of people gathered in the streets of Paris were arguably defending the right to freedom of speech, this freedom apparently does not extend to Ahmed when saying that he was for the terrorists. Social media was flooded with the (incorrectly attributed) quote from Voltaire, stating “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the

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death your right to say it,” but this seems to apply only if what one says falls within the narrative of the French liberal and secular state. Part of the basis for the right to freedom of expression is that there is a fundamental difference between thought and expression, on the one hand, and criminal acts, on the other. Clearly, freedom of speech also comes with a responsibility as to how it is used, and direct threats are generally criminalized. But how can an eight-year-old saying that he is for the terrorists be seen as a violent threat that warrants police investigation?

Are You for or against Charlie? While the response to Ahmed’s statements appears to reveal a level of hypocrisy as to whether or not freedom of speech—or rather, whose freedom of speech—is to be defended, the incident also reveals a startling response on the part of the school and the schoolteacher to the Paris event. What assumptions had been made by the teacher before asking a primary school class whether they were for or against Charlie? Should the children be made aware that they were meant to take a clear stance? Should the school as an institution help them see ‘the right path’? How did the teacher justify his demand that the children should identify as being for or against Charlie? The schoolteacher in this case seems to have taken it as his task to discipline the thoughts and reactions of the children, and no more shocking response could be thought of than Ahmed’s refusal to be for Charlie. Economist and author Frédéric Lordon attempts to disentangle the slogan “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) in a commentary, where he describes the phrase as a metonymy, a part or an attribute that stands in for the whole (see Watson 2015b). In the case of the term ‘Charlie’, a variety

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of different meanings or references can be attached to it. It could refer to the people working at Charlie Hebdo (at this point the attack on the Jewish supermarket had not yet taken place) or also to the idea of freedom of expression. These two became so entangled that it was hard to take a stance in favor of the freedom of expression but against Charlie Hebdo. Lordon describes “Je suis Charlie” as a “formula” that “functioned as an ultimatum” (ibid.) so that all dissent was effectively silenced.

Teachers and the State Around 200 incidents were reported in schools across France, particularly in immigrant suburbs, in which some students refused to observe a moment of silence after the attacks. In response to this, new measures are being introduced by the government to guide teachers in strengthening secular values with a program aimed at giving students “moral and civic training” (Baume 2015). Students would be required to sing the national anthem, and one day in the school year would be set aside for celebrating secular laws. While the program is meant to include lessons on how to fight racism, anti-Semitism, and discrimination, it appears mainly to be geared toward instilling the values of French laïcité (i.e., secularity) in students in immigrant areas. In an older debate on laïcité and the question of banning veils in French schools, Etienne Balibar (2004: 361) argued that the perception of a collapse of the authority of teachers was important in order to understand why a majority of secondary school teachers supported the ban: “It is in this context that teachers see no other remedy for their impotence than symbolically reaffirming the power of the state for which they work, which they reckon will re-establish

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a ruined equilibrium to their advantage. Laïcité, however defined, is not the aim but the instrument of this corporate reflex.” This crisis of authority of the teacher in the classroom provides another inroad for the state to use teachers to instill values of secularism and to help create ‘good French citizens’.

Remnants of Colonialism How can Ahmed’s response to his teacher’s question “Are you for or against Charlie” and the numerous incidents of pupils and students in immigrant areas refusing to comply with a minute of silence be understood? Who are the students resisting in these cases, and what exactly are they resisting? When Ahmed is rendered by his teachers as a terrorist in the making and later handed over to the police, is there not a resonance of old French colonial tropes of the ‘Arab terrorist’ in Algeria? In the video interview, Ahmed also states the following about the day he was taken to the police station: “At lunch time when I was playing and pretending to be an archaeologist, the headmaster came to me and said, ‘Stop digging, you won’t find any machine guns,’ and the teacher said, ‘He’s always looking for some friends to play with,’ and the headmaster said, ‘One day we will find him with a gun in his hands.’” Having refused to be for Charlie and in addition to being of Arab origins, Ahmed is exposed to these racist comments that subsume him under the category of a potential terrorist threat. What sets apart the everyday lives of the young people who were resisting the state-mandated minute of silence? Collecting statistics according to ethnic groups is not allowed in France, but a 2009 study conducted by New York’s Open Society Institute shows that black people in

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Paris are six times more likely to be stopped by police on the street and asked for their IDs than whites and that people of Arab background are almost eight times more likely to be stopped. The authors of the study state that although it is not allowed by French law, “police stops and identity checks in Paris are principally based on the appearance of the person stopped, rather than their behavior or actions” (Goris et al. 2009: 10). While Fanon ([1952] 2008) was writing during the Algerian War of Independence against France and of the deep-seated racism of European colonialism, the description of his experience seems just as apt today: “I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance” (ibid.: 87). In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, cases of racial profiling by the police are on the increase, and a rising number of people are complaining that the police arbitrarily stop them on the street and ask for identity papers on no other apparent grounds than their skin color (Chrisafis 2015). The thousands of people marching in the streets of Paris appear to have been primarily “white, urban and educated” (Lordon in Watson 2015b), while the pupils and students resisting the demands of teachers to uphold a minute of silence or to be for Charlie appear to have come from immigrant suburbs. Could their resistance be just as much a reaction to the increasing vilification of Muslims and blacks in France and in Europe at large? Antonio Negri took a much more optimistic approach to the large demonstration in Paris, arguing that the demonstration “could block—or at least begin to put an end to—the growth cycle of the fascist and chauvinist Right in Europe” (see Watson 2015a). Whether that or the reverse will happen remains to be seen.

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Maria Dyveke Styve is a PhD candidate at the University of Bergen. She is taking part in the Egalitarianism Project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), and is doing research on how events and ruptures shape and form political subjectivities in times of crisis.

References Balibar, Etienne. 2004. “Dissonances within Laïcité.” Constellations 11, no. 3: 353–367. Baume, Maïa de la. 2015. “Paris Announces Plan to Promote Secular Values.” New York Times, 22 January. http://www.nytimes. com/ 2015/01/23/world/europe/charlie-hebdo-attack-leads-tochanges-in-french-schools.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0 (accessed 4 March). Chrisafis, Angelique. 2015. “France Awaits Landmark Ruling on ‘Racial Profiling’ ID Checks.” Guardian, 25 February. http:// www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/25/france-landmarkruling-racial-profiling-checks-police-paris-terror-attacks (accessed 17 April 2015). Fanon, Franz. [1952] 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles L. Markmann. London: Pluto Press. Goris, Indira, Fabien Jobard, and René Lévy. 2009. Profiling Minorities: A Study of Stop-and-Search Practices in Paris. Ed. James A. Goldston, William Kramer, and Rachel Neild. New York: Open Society Institute. http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/ default/files/search_20090630.Web.pdf. Watson, Mike. 2015a. “Charlie Hebdo, Fear and World War: Two Questions for Toni Negri.” Verso Blog, 21 January. http://www. versobooks.com/blogs/1814-charlie-hebdo-fear-and-world-wartwo-questions-for-toni-negri (accessed 4 March 2015). Watson, Mike. 2015b. “Frédéric Lordon: Charlie at Any Cost?” Verso Blog, 20 January. http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1813-fredericlordon-charlie-at-any-cost (accessed 4 March 2015).

Imaginaries of Violence and Surrogates for Politics

k Alessandro Zagato

The event of the attack on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo has generated an enormous and wide-ranging debate in different media to the point that, after some months, the sense of saturation remains strong. In an interview following the shootings (see Curcio 2015), anthropologist Miguel Mellino observes a striking feature of this flood of opinions: to say anything acceptable about what occurred, one has to start by taking some distance and condemning the aggressors and the “barbarity” (the expression used by President François Hollande in his first public statement) of their act. The effectiveness of this rhetorical dispositif (device) reminds us that discourse, as Foucault (1981: 52) has shown, entails a normative order that “wards off its powers and dangers.” People cannot say anything they want in the way they want. There are, instead, regimes of ‘sayability’ regulating their enunciations, especially those that are addressed to the public. It is therefore paradoxical that many of the attempts to understand the explosion of violence that affected Paris in January 2015 have elevated the idea of freedom of speech to a pre-eminent position—for these very efforts to oppose censorship and to advocate for a freely speaking subject are themselves uncritically sustained by a

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normative, disciplining act, such as the condemnation of ‘barbarity’. This contradiction reveals adherence to welldefined structures of power and ideology. In our so-called Western societies, a main ideological horizon that shapes discourse is ‘liberal democracy’. This concept, according to Alain Badiou (2005: 78), has turned into an “authoritarian opinion” to the extent that it is socially unacceptable, almost forbidden, not to be a democrat or to express anti-democratic positions. Following or representing a non-liberal-democratic form of life (for political, cultural, or religious reasons) attracts suspicion and contempt. In the face of the above reflections, one could read “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie)—the outcry that echoed broadly and widely immediately after the attacks (and from which many have subsequently distanced themselves)—as another discursive dispositif. Although it recalls the liberating power of solidarity expressed in the climactic scene of Stanley Kubrick’s memorable film Spartacus, when thousands of captured slaves step forward, proclaiming “I am Spartacus,” the slogan “Je suis Charlie” sounds like the affirmation of something different. It is not an egalitarian call to arms against powerful and arrogant elites, but rather the proclamation of a democratic identity that embraces values such as human rights, secularity, and freedom. These values correspond to the established Western political and moral order and have been ideologically used for decades to support military expeditions against external and internal threats under the label of ‘Islamic terrorism’. The immediate consensus expressed in the popular response to the attacks illustrates how particular events, rather than stimulating a rational debate among citizens, seem to talk to a whole set of deeply rooted ideological constellations and imaginaries, which the notion of

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democracy somehow encompasses and which the media tend to amplify and play with. In this respect, it is interesting to analyze the role played by very specific images in the construction of this democratic imaginary and therefore in the consolidation of current ideological tendencies. After the attacks I have spent a fair amount of time following the news reports on television. The hours-long repetition of footage and images of the shootings made me reflect on how an intensive exposure to specific visual details can create or amplify collective affective states in a particular cultural context, eventually moving people to think and act in a certain way. With the idea of ‘democracy of emotion’, Paul Virilio (2005) addresses the issues raised by live coverage and its pretensions, including immediacy and ubiquity. According to Virilio, the variety of images and perspectives used by the media to describe a particular event does not stimulate comparison and reflection because we are not facing a rational, logical differentiation of images, which would allow a plurality of points of view. What we are witnessing instead is the converging of these images into a ‘democracy of emotion’, whereby the synchronization of emotions works as a condition of reality—“[a]nd this means collective emotion, at once synchronized and globalized, the model for which could well be some kind of postpolitical tele-evangelism” (ibid.: 347). In our case, emotional consensus spins around the paranoid fantasy of the Islamization of the Occident, the threat posed by an absolute ‘other’ as fundamentalist, and the clash of civilizations. While observing the images being broadcast during and after the attacks, I was reminded of Virilio’s idea and started playing a small game. I tried for a moment to shut out critical reason and follow the flow of my own emotions and fantasies to see where they would lead. In particular, I focused on a short video being replayed continually in

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which one of the attackers approaches a wounded policeman and finishes him off with a bullet to his head. Witnessing a murder is always disturbing. Instinctively, one tends to empathize with the victim—in this case, lying helplessly on the floor, begging his assailant for mercy in a last desperate attempt to survive—versus the ruthless killer, running toward his victim and shooting him with no hesitation. The sequence offered by this video is particularly perturbing. The upside-down visual angle over the scene gives the spectator an ambiguous, mixed feeling of panopticism and impotency. The specific frame of the murder evokes a dystopian vision of the collapse of the (French) state order—in the moment of the fall of its last defender—at the hands of obscure forces. Following this line of imagination, the sense of impotency can quickly turn into a feeling of victimhood and then, immediately afterward, into a desire for revenge or punishment. This murder sequence constitutes the archetypical expedient for war, where a previously passive and atomized mass of spectators (the French audience in this case) becomes aware that the nation is a victim that needs to unite in order to react to a threat and defend itself. One could contend that the outstanding mobilization of citizens and police forces around the country in the months following the attacks responds to this particular type of sentiment. Victimhood can quickly turn into moral blackmail and aggression. In a recent interview, Julien Coupat, one of the founders of the philosophical journal Tiqqun, who has been involved since 2008 in a case of terrorism against the French state, has argued that “anti-terrorism has nothing to do with the struggle against terrorism. It is directed only not toward terrorists but toward the whole population, with the intent to intimidate it” (Lancelin 2015; my translation). The sweeping new

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surveillance law approved by the French Parliament in May 2015 in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks goes in that direction.1 “I think that the set of political maneuvers that followed the attacks of January, including the exemplary Intelligence Law,” said Coupat, “have just demonstrated the following: anti-terrorism is undoubtedly a governmental technique, an instrument of depoliticization and mass control” (ibid.). Returning to the idea of a line of imagination, I would now like to consider the above-mentioned video from another angle. Indeed, I have to admit that watching a group of unidentified people (could be anybody) defeating a policeman—the epitome of enforcement and oppression, the embodiment of the structural violence of the state—gave me a slight sense of hope. Abstracting this sequence from its real context and fantasizing on the pure act it represents, I was reminded of the symbolic horizon of revolt, of radical transformation and victory of the weak over the powerful—in short, of revolutionary violence. I suspect that the scenario disclosed by this second line of fantasy is not comparable to the average spectator’s perception, which is probably closer to the imaginary of state collapse and victimhood described above. These insurrectional and anti-state sentiments might in some way be similar to those felt by socially marginalized Arab- or African-background youth who live in the popular neighborhoods of Paris. Accustomed to being stopped and searched based on racial profiling, they are therefore hostile to cops. The aesthetic of these images, I surmise, can somehow satisfy some people’s latent desire for justice and emancipation. As I said, this was just a small game based on fantasy and speculation. The point was to explore trajectories of emotional consensus that the images repeatedly broadcast by the media might open up. In my view, they evoke the

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broad context in which violence erupted: an obnoxious synthesis of hate and fear, segregation and violence, as well as a lack of meaningful political perspectives offered to ordinary people. On the one hand, the images of the attacks relate to the inconsistency of present-day liberaldemocratic ideological and political forms, which need to be legitimized by a constant state of alert, fear, and eventually war. On the other hand, they evoke what is conspicuously absent in this story: a politics of liberation and emancipation, a collective capacity to oppose segregation in the name of an idea of equality capable of replacing old and saturated notions such as freedom of speech, secularism, and human rights, which are currently mobilized as a pretext for Western domination. Thus, without being apologetic, one should not overlook the context in which these episodes of violence took place—a composition similar to that which led to the 2005 uprisings in the banlieues (suburbs). This theme is amazingly represented in the 1995 film La Haine (Hate) by Mathieu Kassovitz, which exposes many of the ‘ingredients’ of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo. La Haine narrates the misadventures of three young men from the banlieues, one of whom is black, one North African, and the third a Jew. They are portrayed as a bit naive, but also full of rage against the police and a society in which they cannot find their place. In his film, Kassovitz suggests that such violence does not erupt from a void, as the notion of ‘event’ and the media spectacularization might suggest. It does not occur against a background of peaceful neutrality. Slavoj Žižek (2008: 1), for instance, invites us “to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjective’ violence,” as he defines it, “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts” (ibid.). Indeed, according to

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Žižek, this directly observable violence “is just the most visible portion of a triumvirate that also includes two objective kinds of violence. First, there is a ‘symbolic’ violence embodied in language and its forms” (ibid.), imposing a certain universe of meaning, and “[s]econd, there is what I call ‘systemic’ violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (ibid.: 2). Thinking of the context in which the attacks took place, one should note that many of the cartoon strips published by Charlie Hebdo are of an explicitly racist nature, for example, mocking Arabs by portraying them with stereotypical facial features and mannerisms. I find it pointless to say that for parity’s sake the artists also treat the Pope and the Christian God similarly, because these refer to the dominant religion in France, not the demonized one, which has been the object of decades of political attacks in the name of republican and democratic universalism and which represents a disenfranchised minority. When it comes to ‘black-faced’ Africans, everything is somehow clearer. “I mock black people, but I do the same with whites” is a disclaimer for racism that simply does not work, because it does not take into account history and the current social realities of oppression. Satire should criticize power, but it should not fuel hatred toward the oppressed or ridicule them. The above reflections are not aimed at justifying the murder of a group of journalists. They are intended to highlight the fact that the cultural attitude of ironic distance made possible by the supposed universal position occupied by a privileged Western liberal-democratic subject (such as Charlie Hebdo) is supremacist, and it can be felt as arrogant and offensive, with dramatic consequences. It would be ingenuous to think that the daily and structural forms of violence suffered by Arab people in

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Paris and elsewhere have no consequences. On a broader scale and time span, we should consider the destruction and cultural imperialism that Muslim people have experienced since the start of the ‘war on terror’ (an “Infinite War,” as the Bush administration defined it). This picture includes combative enthusiasms, like those animating the 2011 intervention in Libya, in which France played a major role. But it also includes the complacent passivity of many European governments vis-à-vis the annihilation of the Palestinian people in the Middle East. If we add to the mix the enduring tensions rooted in France’s colonial past, it is easy to imagine how anti-state and anti-Western sentiments may emerge among parts of the population. Evidence in support of this position can be found in the anthropological research of Emilio Quadrelli (2007), who has revealed how reminiscences of anti-colonialism, and of the Algerian War in particular, played a central role in the ideas and forms of organization expressed by the banlieue uprisings of 2005. By the same token, the Islamic State (or ISIS), the organization that the perpetrators of the Paris attacks seem to have been affiliated with, is in part the outcome of decades of precise political, military, and economic choices carried out by Western interventionism in the area. ISIS has not appeared randomly, nor is it the result of a distinctive Muslim predilection for fanaticism and violence, as current discursive tendencies are portraying it. Considering that the perpetrators of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo were French citizens, born and raised in Parisian banlieues, a crucial question is why they felt the need to do what they did. Why did the Kouachi brothers travel to Yemen via Oman in 2011 to undergo weapons training in the deserts of Marib, an al-Qaeda stronghold (Bayoumy and Ghobari 2015)? The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation has recently reported that there are now

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around 4,000 European fighters with ISIS, doubling the number from a year ago (Malik 2015). One can formulate an abundance of hypotheses to explain this massive phenomenon, but if we stick to politics, two critical points need to be addressed, in my view. The first has to do with a process of weakening in Europe of what Jürgen Habermas (1991) has described as the ‘public sphere’, a place of interaction where people meet and deliberate over matters of common concern. It is a place where, as Žižek (2005: 117) has pointed out, “one operates as a symbolic agent who cannot be reduced to a private individual, to a bundle of personal attributes, desires, traumas and idiosyncrasies.” This decline and related processes of atomization and disengagement from main social institutions have reinforced identity politics, resulting in naturalized ethnic cultural tensions exasperated by racism, aggression, and class inequalities. This explains in part the very peculiar process of radicalization that many European young people go through before joining ISIS. What is striking about the life trajectories of these recruits is the fact that they do not radicalize by engaging with organizations present in their immediate environment but through the Internet, that is, probably in complete isolation and loneliness. What draws most of them to such a tremendous life change is “neither politics nor religion. It is a search for something a lot less definable: for identity, for meaning, for ‘belongingness’, for respect” (Malik 2015). There is also, however, a further point to be considered that is tightly related to the first one. It involves the crisis of class politics and the depoliticization of traditional forms of mass organization (e.g., political parties and unions), which used to be decisive in the production of a public sphere and also played what I would call a pedagogic role for young people from the popular classes.

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As Kenan Malik (2015) expresses it, “In the past, social disaffection may have led people to join movements for political change, from far-left groups to anti-racist campaigns. Today, such organisations often seem equally out of touch.” Concerned above all with their own survival (when they are in the minority) or with competing for power (when they are mainstream), these organizations have dramatically distanced themselves from the reality of ordinary people. As a result, disenfranchised young people have no emancipatory political narrative dedicated to them, and rarely are they offered any meaningful principle of orientation, outside the “seductive efficiency of economic competition” (Guattari 2000: 68). They do not encounter a possible shared idea, a new possibility “having to do with a positive strategic future” (Badiou 2013: 45). Experiencing such a political/pedagogic void, workers and subaltern members of the population are subjectively divided and dispersed in ethnic/identitarian tensions. From what is written above, it is possible to draw a line of continuity between the 2005 banlieue riots and the recent attacks. Namely, the uprisings of 2005 represented what John Holloway (2010: 188) would describe as a collective “scream” of disenfranchised young people against a situation of oppression and marginalization that had become unbearable. However, the problem that such a scream poses is what to do with it, that is, “how to find a way forward, a way of making this scream effective” (ibid.). The riots confronted French society with powerful questions that no political organization was able to respond to. No relevant political answer was articulated that could resonate among those who participated in the riots and provide them with some sort of reference for further engagement. No “open, constituent process” (Hardt and Negri 2009: 226) has followed up the outburst

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of rage. The rioters were abandoned to a sense of disorientation that, in some cases, is currently being fulfilled by pseudo naturalized identitarian views, providing a sense of belonging and a way out. Ambiguous organizations like ISIS are taking advantage of this latent rage and discontent, with very dangerous consequences. Badiou has argued that the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo attacks were “working-class kids drawn away from lives in which they saw no meaning—and thought they had no escape from—by the fascination of the pure act” (see Watson 2015). Analogous processes are taking place among disenfranchised white populations across Europe, resulting in hostility to migrants and the rise of previously marginal fascist organizations. Such loyalties and dramatic acts present themselves as a surrogate for something else that has not yet been found—a new politics of emancipation.

Alessandro Zagato is a postdoctoral researcher in the Egalitarianism Project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), within the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He is currently developing a research project on the interplay between politics and aesthetics in indigenous movements of the south of Mexico. He recently edited an issue of Rufián Revista (2014) on aesthetics and autonomy in the Zapatista movement and published a chapter on the Occupy movement in the collection Cyborg Subjects: Discourses on Digital Culture (2013).

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Notes 1. According to an article in the Guardian, “The new law will allow authorities to spy on the digital and mobile phone communications of anyone linked to a ‘terrorist’ inquiry without prior authorisation from a judge. It forces internet service providers and phone companies to give up data upon request. Intelligence services will have the right to place cameras and recording devices in private homes and install so-called keylogger devices that record every key stroke on a targeted computer in real time. The authorities will be able to keep recordings for a month and metadata for five years” (Chrisafis 2015).

References Badiou, Alain. 2005. Metapolitics. Trans. Jason Barker. London: Verso. Badiou, Alain. 2013. “Our Contemporary Impotence.” Trans. Olivia L. Fraser. Radical Philosophy 181: 43–47. Bayoumy, Yara, and Mohammed Ghobari. 2015. “Both Brothers behind Paris Attack Had Weapons Training in Yemen—Sources.” Reuters, 12 January. http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/01/11/ france-shooting-yemen-idINKBN0KK0GY20150111. Chrisafis, Angelique. 2015. “France Passes New Surveillance Law in Wake of Charlie Hebdo Attack.” Guardian, 5 May. http:// www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/05/france-passes-newsurveillance-law-in-wake-of-charlie-hebdo-attack. Curcio, Anna. 2015. “‘I’m the West’: Interview with Miguel Mellino.” Commonware, 15 January. http://commonware.org/index.php/ cloe/545-in-the-west. Foucault, Michel. 1981. “The Order of Discourse.” Pp. 48–78 in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert J. C. Young. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Guattari, Félix. 2000. The Three Ecologies. Trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: Athlone. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Boston: MIT Press.

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Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Holloway, John. 2010. Crack Capitalism. New York: Pluto Press. Lancelin, Aude. 2015. “Julien Coupat: ‘Le cynisme de nos gouvernants est inoxydable.’” L’Observateur, 11 May. http://tempsreel. nouvelobs.com/loi-renseignement/20150511.OBS8735/exclusifjulien-coupat-le-cynisme-de-nos-gouvernants-est-inoxydable.html. Malik, Kenan. 2015. “A Search for Identity Draws Jihadis to the Horrors of Isis.” Guardian, 1 March. http://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2015/mar/01/what-draws-jihadis-to-isis -identity-alienation. Quadrelli, Emilio. 2007. “Grassroots Political Militants: Banlieusards and Politics.” Mute, 30 May. http://www.metamute. org/editorial/articles/grassroots-political-militants-banlieusards -and-politics. Virilio, Paul. 2005. “Democracy of Emotion.” Trans. Julie Rose. Cultural Politics 1, no. 3: 339–352. Watson, Mike. 2015. “The Red Flag and the Tricolore by Alain Badiou.” Verso Blog, 3 February. http://www.versobooks.com/ blogs/1833-the-red-flag-and-the-tricolore-by-alain-badiou. Žižek, Slavoj. 2005. “Against Human Rights.” New Left Review 34: 115–131. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books.

Where Were You, Charlie? Contesting Voices of Political Activism in the Wake of a Tragedy

k Mari Hanssen Korsbrekke

My article is an attempt to explore some of the contesting voices of activism that were spurred in the wake of the terror attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices. My initial focus is on how the “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) movement triggered several juxtaposing forms of political activism in social media. I then center this discussion on a letter posted on Facebook by a Scandinavian political activist, who calls for a more engaged and better-educated response to this event. Within these forms of activism, my interlocutors reveal some of the paradoxes of the affects of such events—that is, how these happenings are not ruptures but intensifications. In other words, if one poses that the terror attack was an event, it is still not understood as an exceptional event or as an event that disjoints other events. Rather, it is understood as one of many moments in time in which patterns of social life are constructed as more apparent, intensified, and exaggerated, allowing them to be more easily identified and analyzed (Kapferer 2010). These forms of political activism that we observed in the aftermath also show us how this event quickly became delocalized. It is understood not as a disjuncture but as an atypical moment—part of several becomings of life-worlds

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that are opening up potential futures (Deleuze 2004). My argument therefore does not center on only the generic aspects of the event and the changes that have transpired because of it. Instead, it aims to address some of the new social proc­esses that have come into play.

Responses to an Event The civic and state response was enormous after two brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, killed 12 people during their attack on Charlie Hebdo’s head offices in Paris on Wednesday, 7 January 2015. The attack was a response to several critically disputed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that had been printed by the magazine, whose contributors had been threatened previously. This event was further intensified by the subsequent hostage situation that developed in a kosher food store in eastern Paris the following Friday. The hostage taker, Amedy Coulibaly, was allegedly a friend of the Kouachi brothers. He was at that point a prime suspect, believed to be involved in two different shootings in the days before, hurting 11 people and killing 1 civilian and 1 policewoman. These incidents were believed to be synchronized with the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices, and all parties were supposedly strongly connected to al-Qaeda (El Deeb 2015). After a few hours in which customers were detained in the store, four of whom ended up being killed, French commandos stormed the building and assassinated Coulibaly. His common law wife and likely accomplice, Hayat Boumeddiene, is now rumored to be in Syria.1 Ninety thousand police officers searched for the Kouachi brothers for over 48 hours. The battle ended on Friday, 9 January, after a confrontation in and near a printing house on the outskirts of Paris (BBC 2015a).

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The event of the Paris attacks seemed to have sparked several other occurrences of violence. On 14 February, shots were fired at a cultural center in Copenhagen during a free speech debate that featured Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, known for depicting Muhammad as a dog. One man was killed, and shortly afterwards a member of the Copenhagen Jewish community was shot dead while standing guard outside a synagogue (Al Jazeera 2015). Later in May, a similar incident happened at a Dallas, Texas, meeting organized by a group known for strongly resisting what they believe to be the Islamization of the United States (BBC 2015b). Most of the targeted victims had insulted the Prophet in the name of free speech, but is free speech what is really at stake here? Violent reactions and death threats against organizations, individuals, magazines, and newspapers depicting the Prophet are not a new phenomenon, especially in Scandinavia, where this event seemed all too familiar. Many of us still remember well the violent turbulence and tensions that ensued after one of Denmark’s largestselling daily newspapers, Jyllands-Posten, printed satirical images of Muhammad on 30 September 2005. Some Norwegian newspapers, as well as Charlie Hebdo, posted facsimiles of the drawings, resulting in several riots; boycotts of Danish, Norwegian, and French products in the Middle East; and the fatwa put on Jyllands-Posten in January 2006 (Pletten 2015). Although the attacks in Paris were not expected per se, they were hardly surprising: Charlie Hebdo had published several caricatures of Muhammad in the past that had produced threats, its offices had been firebombed in 2011 for naming Muhammad an editor-in-chief for the week’s issue, and the magazine had been sued in 2007 for “publicly ‘insulting’ Islam” (Duggan 2015). Every time the right to freedom of expression and speech is invoked as the

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Holy Grail of the conflict, however, many political activists assert that the call for free speech contains a latent colonialist backdrop, revealing the secular and perhaps xenophobic urge to mock and discriminate against Muslims. A political activist whom I spoke with stated that “this form of protest, the violent martyrdom, is part of a long history,” and she connected this event to the form of martyrdom that Palestinian Muslim men had engaged in, especially before the division between Abu Nidal and Yasser Arafat. She continued: One of the biggest differences in cultural understandings between the West and these Muslim men is that they don’t really get why states and authority figures would allow for this form of expression to be published without reprimand and even with full support. It’s a very strong and frustrating thing to watch. I know only a little about what they feel when Muhammad is portrayed in this manner, but their rage is undeniable. Many of these young men are lost, you know, and there are so many of them—which means that we need to start thinking differently about how we treat these issues.

After the first attack on 7 January, the initial reaction among Charlie Hebdo sympathizers was to take part in symbolic solidarity proclamations, resulting in the “Je suis Charlie” movement, which was primarily centered around the showcasing of an image of this slogan in thick letters in white and gray on a black background. The daily newspaper Le Progrès identified its creator as Joachim Roncin, a French artist and music journalist for Stylist magazine, who posted it on Twitter less than an hour after the first attack. The slogan went viral in a matter of moments, most visibly on Facebook pages when people who identified with “Charlie” changed their profile pictures to this image (Provost 2015). Symbolically and publicly displaying that

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you were Charlie would develop into the encompassment of an array of different meanings, but a general conception was that it signified sympathy with the victims, as well as engagement with the right to freedom of speech and expression for the press. This movement garnered a broad spectrum of solidarity acts on an international level; however, its message became thoroughly disputed. Especially in France, those who did not want to pronounce “I am Charlie” would be accused of supporting terrorism, effectively silencing dissent, as Maria Dyveke contends in this volume. The “I am” declaration of solidarity is influenced by one of the most powerful scenes in movie history. Stanley Kubrick’s (1960) film Spartacus depicts the battle led by the Roman slave Spartacus between his army of slaves and the legions of the Roman Empire. When Spartacus and his followers lose the battle, the Roman general promises the slaves that their lives will be spared if they surrender Spartacus. One by one, the slaves rise and declare, “I am Spartacus” in an act of solidarity with their leader. The “I am” has been adopted globally as a script of solidarity activism, and its use has intensified over the last few years, as with, for example, the “I am Trayvon Martin” movement protesting the 2012 shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida. After the Charlie Hebdo attack, the “Je suis Charlie” slogan initiated a heated debate in the social media platform: were you Charlie, or not? What did it mean to be Charlie? What dangers were presented by those who were not Charlie? Facebook and Twitter were flooded with contesting arguments and dialogues, followed by the emergence of new, related slogans. Many political activists and others who engaged in a low-intensity form of social media activism were critiqued for too easily throwing themselves

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on the Charlie wave. Others claimed to identify with the victims of the shootings who were not directly connected to the magazine. Citing the statement, incorrectly attributed to Voltaire, about the willingness to sacrifice oneself to fight for the freedom of others, some stated “Je suis Ahmed”—the Muslim police officer who was executed trying to defend the Charlie Hebdo offices. Some claimed to be the more random victims of the shootings in Paris, such as Yoav Hattab and Philippe Braham, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And these are just some of the contesting voices that emerged. Within all this lies a challenge to do political activism in a ‘correct’ manner and to acknowledge the lack of attention paid to other human travesties that have taken place (and are still doing so) in the quest for freedom of expression. This discussion also identifies some of the differences between solidarity movements and social movements, with the former taking a more hands-on approach. An example of solidarity activism was the ‘ring of peace’ that Norwegian Muslim youths organized to encircle the Oslo synagogue after the Copenhagen attack (Hovland 2015). The young people involved declared that no one should feel unsafe because of his or her identity or beliefs and that Muslims in Norway would stand with the Jewish community in the wake of the tragedy. These forms of activism constitute an approach to handling issues that is more direct than much of what the social media platform offers.

Where Were You? With her permission, I have translated an open letter that a young Norwegian political activist posted on her Facebook page in response to the “Je suis Charlie” movement. In it,

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she calls for what one can interpret as a ‘more active activism’ and for more engagement in the many causes that are supported by different wings of the Scandinavian activist milieu. More importantly, she questions the public’s low-intensity personal involvement following the Charlie Hebdo attack and what it might tell us about the general knowledge and outlook that people display when reacting to events like these. She suggests that the Charlie supporters might not be informed or brave enough to know what it really means to be Charlie. Apparently, everyone is Charlie now, in the name of free speech. I find this quite curious … Have you all of a sudden started to care about those who fight for the right to say the things that might not be well received? For I have never seen you at the demonstrations. Where were you, Charlie, when we protested for the cause of Raif Badawi?2 … Where were you when we gathered for the children of Gaza who were bereft of electricity and Internet access? And for the journalists who were killed there before they had the opportunity to be heard? Where were you, Charlie, when we lit candles for Syria? When we gave our signatures for Norway to accept more of those who fled over the ocean with their children in open boats to escape torture? … Where were you when we stood in front of the Parliament and asked for assistance to help the women in Tahrir Square who were raped while they were fighting for their right to protest, for the right to run their own country … What did you post on your wall the day Boko Haram sent a little girl into a crowd with bombs taped to her body? I have never seen you at the demonstrations, Charlie. If you are not the one who sat there that day and posted nine-year-old photos that someone else drew of someone else’s prophet disguised as a pig, or a man with a turban, like the Sikhs use, with a bomb inside, is there a slight

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chance that you’re not Charlie? Is there a possibility that you’re part of the choir of hypocrites who quietly accept that human beings are being pressured into silence when their lives are threatened? Is there any chance that you might not be one to care much about human rights, and that you threw yourself into an unfortunate racist wave, where you uncritically and imprecisely kicked outward, downward … Could it be that you haven’t even really familiarized yourself with the difference between Sikhism and Islam? I am not Charlie … I am Amanda … I do not think it’s worth the price … I do not think it’s helpful to make people more fearful, perhaps so scared or disappointed that they stop talking. That does not promote freedom of speech.

What we see here is an example of a very puritan activist ethos, represented by someone especially engaged in human rights causes and more knowledgeable about them than most of us can claim to be. Demonstrating an activist’s frustrations with the attitudes of the majority, the text suggests that there is a hypocrisy within the “Je suis Charlie” movement—that when these white journalists in the Western world were killed for derogatory drawings, it hit closer to home for many people than the other issues that are mentioned. What does that tell us, really? Could it be that some people’s right to freedom of expression is more important than that of others? If you care so much about Charlie, why not care more about, say, Badawi, a Saudi Arabian who has been imprisoned and sentenced to receive 1,000 lashes for promoting freedom of speech? These forms of social mobilizations demand strategies to control different contesting past and future imaginaries and narratives and how to understand them. On the other hand, one might argue that this form of low-intensity activism is a useful format for raising the political awareness of the public. Being Charlie does not necessarily mean that you would be willing to die like

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Charlie. The symbolic act of changing your Facebook profile picture is simply an act of solidarity. The question then becomes, what type of awareness do we encourage when following such formats? Are we producing actual social changes? Social mediums have generated several scripts of solidarity activism, and group actions and campaigns—such as the Bring Back Our Girls movement to rescue schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram and the Black Lives Matter movement founded after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin—have used similar strategies to gain attention, with somewhat fruitful results. This perhaps shows again that the event is an intensification that can possibly open up new social formations. The question remains as to whether the Charlie Hebdo event resulted in more antagonism between different political activists, which may not be helpful at all.

Concluding Remarks Events like these may have the potential to generate new social formations, but it does not appear that the Charlie Hebdo event in particular has brought about much more than perhaps a moment of extreme intensity. In reviewing the event some months later, one might ask, where have all the Charlies gone? Are they still fighting for freedom of speech, or have they moved on as easily as they changed their profile pictures in the first place? This is not to say that the Charlies were not deeply affected by this event. But parts of the movement depended on that intensity— and when it faded, the movement did as well. The initial reactions to the Charlie Hebdo shootings on social media platforms were engrossed in a form of engagement that now has seemingly developed into a global script of low-intensity activism with the goal of raising

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awareness, which in and of itself is not a bad thing. But if this form of activism generates new social processes, they are perhaps also on a low level of intensity. To be sure, I am not claiming anything new here. Perhaps more of us should care a little more, do a little more. So where are all the Charlies now? Are you fighting for the right to freedom of speech for everyone?

Mari Hanssen Korsbrekke holds a BA and MA in Social Anthropology from the University of Bergen. She has conducted research in New Orleans on parade and festival traditions in light of the post–Hurricane Katrina context. For her PhD, she is currently working with intentional communities in North America as part of a European Research Council (ERC) funded project titled “Egalitarianism: Forms, Processes, Comparisons.”

Notes 1. The Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda later took responsibility for the attacks. 2. Badawi, a Saudi Arabian blogger and co-founder of the website Free Saudi Liberals, has been incarcerated and charged with apostasy (for disobeying his father, a crime in Saudi Arabia) and creating forums that conflict with Islamic values. Arrested in 2012, he was originally sentenced in 2013 to 7 years in prison and 600 lashes from a whip. He was then resentenced in 2014 to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes. Badawi received the first 50 lashes on 9 January 2015, but none since then on medical grounds. In June 2015, the Saudi Supreme Court upheld all of the sentences against Badawi (BBC 2015c).

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References Al Jazeera. 2015. “Copenhagen Shootings: Charlie Hebdo-Inspired?” 15 February. http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/ 2015/02/copenhagen-shootings-charlie-hebdo-150215204659022. html (accessed 19 February). BBC. 2015a. “Charlie Hebdo Attack: Three Days of Terror.” 14 January. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30708237 (accessed 3 March). BBC. 2015b. “Gunmen Killed at Dallas Event on Prophet Muhammad Cartoons.” 4 May. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us -canada-32579396. BBC. 2015c. “Saudi Court Upholds Blogger’s 10 Years and 1,000 Lashes.” 7 June. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east -33039815. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Continuum. Duggan, Oliver. 2015. “Charlie Hebdo Attack: 2011 Firebomb over Prophet Mohammed Issue.” Telegraph, 7 January. http://www. telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11330145/ Charlie-Hebdo-attack-2011-firebomb-over-Prophet-Mohammedissue.html. El Deeb, Sarah. 2015. “Member of Al Qaeda in Yemen Says Group Directed Charlie Hebdo Attack.” Huffington Post, 9 January. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/09/al-qaeda-yemenstatement-paris-attack_n_6446290.html (accessed 3 April). Hovland, Kjetil M. 2015. “Norway Muslims Encircle Synagogue to Support Jews.” Wall Street Journal, 21 February. http:// www.wsj.com/articles/norway-muslims-encircle-synagogue-to -support-jews-1424549778. Kapferer, Bruce. 2010. “Introduction: In the Event—toward an Anthropology of Generic Moments.” Social Analysis 54, no. 3: 1–27. Kubrick, Stanley, dir. 1960. Spartacus. Film, 184 min., Byrna Productions. Pletten, Christina. 2015. “Dette er karikaturstriden.” Bergens Tidende, 7 January. http://www.bt.no/nyheter/utenriks/Detteer-karikaturstriden-3275476.html (accessed 18 May). Provost, Lauren. 2015. “The Man Behind #JeSuisCharlie.” HuffPost France, 7 January. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/07/ je-suis-charlie-creator_n_6432712.html (accessed 17 March).

Moral, All-Too Moral Satire, Morality, and Charlie Hebdo

k Jacob Hjortsberg

I. To be or not to be Charlie: that has been the question since the attack on 7 January 2015, during which 12 people were shot to death by two heavily armed men who stormed the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in central Paris. Shortly after the attack, the hashtag “#JeSuisCharlie” (I am Charlie) appeared on Twitter. Paralleling similar solidarity slogans of the past—such as “I am Spartacus” from the end of Stanley Kubrick’s (1960) movie Spartacus, John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963, and the more recent “I am Michael Brown,” referring to race relations in the United States—the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag spread like wildfire. All of a sudden, Charlie Hebdo became synonymous with all that is allegedly good about French political life: freedom of speech, the spirit of enlightenment, secularity (laïcité)—you name it. To identify with those murdered at Charlie Hebdo—to march the streets of Paris (or any other city for that matter) together with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people, declaring to the world, “I am Charlie”—was to stand up for all those things. On the day of the shootings, New Yorker writer George Packer (2015)

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asserted that “we must all try to be Charlie, not just today but every day.” Almost as fast and almost as eagerly as people declared themselves to be Charlie, however, others declared themselves not to be. Among the latter, some claimed instead to be Ahmed, using the alternative hashtag “#JeSuisAhmed” to refer to Ahmed Merabet, the French police officer who was murdered outside the Charlie Hebdo offices by the same gunmen. For those who preferred this hashtag, what was significant about Ahmed was the fact that he was a Muslim. If anyone embodies the oft-quoted saying “I hate your opinions but would die for your right to express them,”1 it is surely Ahmed, they claimed, and not the staff at Charlie Hebdo. As Dyab Abou Jahjah put it in a very popular tweet (at the time of writing it has been retweeted over 39,000 times): “I am not Charlie, I am Ahmed the dead cop. Charlie ridiculed my faith and culture and I died defending his right to do so.”2 Others who were critical of the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag pointed to the fact that a principled defense of freedom of speech is not the same as a de facto defense of all speech. The all-too-easy identification of Charlie Hebdo with freedom of speech as such, they argued, is therefore counterproductive. If saying “I am Charlie” becomes equated with saying “I am a supporter of freedom of speech,” this will tend to exclude criticism of Charlie Hebdo from the domain of free speech, even though criticism is in fact an essential aspect of freedom of speech. And these people were critical of Charlie Hebdo. For example, Jacob Canfield (2015), writing for the online magazine The Hooded Utilitarian, maintained that “[f]ree speech is an important part of our society, but … free speech does not mean freedom from criticism. Criticism is speech—to honor ‘free speech martyrs’ by shouting down any criticism of their work is both ironic and depressing.” This sentiment was echoed

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in a Jacobin magazine article by Richard Seymour (2015), who stated that there is “a critical difference between solidarity with the journalists who were attacked, refusing to concede anything to the idea that journalists are somehow ‘legitimate targets,’ and solidarity with what is frankly a racist publication.” These views were expressed by many others as well.

II. Notwithstanding this disagreement about whether or not to be Charlie, the terms of the debate also betray an underlying agreement between the two sides. Despite occupying what appear to be diametrically opposed positions, both sides of the debate seemed to agree that the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag should be understood within the framework of freedom of speech. For those claiming to be Charlie, this was obviously so, because for them Charlie Hebdo became the very paragon of free speech. But this was also true, I suggest, for those claiming not to be Charlie, since they invariably articulated their critique from the position of having understood better the true meaning of freedom of speech. They supported their stance either by identifying some other subject position as the proper subject of freedom of speech (e.g., “Je suis Ahmed”), or by pointing out that, since criticism of speech is also speech, anyone who seriously want to defend freedom of speech should defend not only Charlie Hebdo, but also those who wish to critique Charlie Hebdo. Intentionally or not, therefore, what this meant was that the question of whether or not to be Charlie turned into a question of how to draw up the contours of a certain moral community of speakers. Whether or not the speaker identified as Charlie, what was at stake was how to speak morally in the face of these killings—either by saying

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“I am Charlie,” and thus excluding criticism of Charlie Hebdo from the moral community of free speech, or by saying “I am not Charlie,” and thus including criticism of Charlie Hebdo within that community. In both cases, this meant that the speaker legitimated his or her speech on the basis of it being included in the moral community of free speech, thus construing that speech as moral. It is with this underlying agreement that I wish to disagree in this essay. If, in relation to Charlie Hebdo, speech can be defended only insofar as it is construed as moral, this is a problem, I will argue, since the speech or expression that is actually being discussed here—satire—is a particular kind of speech, the unique value of which is precisely that it is amoral. In other words, even though the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were indeed using their right to free speech, and even though the attack on them might indeed have been an attack on that right, as a point of departure for discussion this is only relevant once we remove ourselves from the concrete context at hand. In fact, the cartoons were not in themselves drawn simply as free speech, and the murders that took place because of them were not motivated by hatred of free speech as such, but by hatred of the particular kind of speech that freedom of speech happened to generate this time. For these reasons, I therefore suggest that we might do well to revisit the debate from the point of view of satire rather than freedom of speech.

III. First, a definition is in order. In essence, my position on satire is structurally comparable to the joke, made popular by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, that “my fiancée is never late for an appointment, because when she is late,

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she is no longer my fiancée.” Satire, I hold, is never moral, because when it is moral, it is no longer satire. Instead, in my view, satire is always amoral. If satire were a person, I imagine that it would probably be Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in J. D. Salinger’s ([1951] 1994) The Catcher in the Rye—a person who thinks that everyone is a ‘phony’, but who at the same time does not seem to have any clear idea of what it would mean not to be a phony. He offers no alternative morality to the one he dismisses—and this, at best, is what makes him better than all the phonies, who pretend to be moral but really are not. Holden’s position is, I suggest, therefore the position of satire: accepting the gap between official morality and actual life (a gap, again, that the phonies refuse to acknowledge), remaining defiantly within it. This definition of satire is much inspired by Freud’s ([1927] 1985) definition of humor, which he formulated in a short article. The question that Freud asks here is precisely, how can someone make fun of a situation without being in any way outside it? As his prime example of this peculiar human ability, Freud mentions a joke made by “a criminal who was being led out to the gallows on a Monday [and] remarked: ‘Well, the week’s beginning nicely’” (ibid.: 161). How is this subject-position possible? For Freud, the answer comes by reminding the reader that there are other ways of achieving ‘distance’ than by being outside of the situation that one makes fun of. The required distance, he says, is not necessarily established between ‘the subject’ and ‘the situation’, but can also be established within the subject herself. Specifically, the humorous distance is, according to Freud, established between the ego and the superego. Usually, he says, we know the superego as a ‘severe master’—this is the superego that shames us when we have acted morally wrong, or compels us to act morally. However, the reason why we experience the superego as a

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severe master in these situations is because we relate to the superego from the position of the ego. Now, Freud claims, humor becomes possible when the reverse happens—when the psychic energy of the subject is ‘transposed’ from the ego onto the superego and we consequently experience the ego from the position of the superego. When that happens, Freud ([1927] 1985: 219) says, “the ego can appear tiny and all its interests trivial”— and we can laugh, so to speak, at ourselves. Crucially, this also means that the position of humor is amoral, since the moral command of the superego, felt by the ego as a moral compass, is traded in for a psychic identification of the subject with the superego. It does not mean, however, that the position of humor has to be immoral. In fact, as Simon Critchley (2007) has recently argued, humor might well be conceived of as an ethical position, since the subject— deprived of the superego-as-master—now has complete responsibility over her actions.

IV. Putting aside here the problem that Freud’s analysis supposes the psyche to be in a vacuum, outside of any political, cultural, or social context, his basic point can be utilized to deal with just such a contextualized subject. Basically, what his analysis suggests is that the relation between the subject and the moral commands that are placed upon her—or, more specifically, the gap that will always exist between the two—can be experienced in two different ways. Either, the subject can experience the moral commands precisely as commands—as something coming from the outside, in relation to which her shortcomings are felt as shameful. Or, the subject can transpose herself onto those moral commands, realizing herself as their agent—in

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which case they will no longer be felt as commands but rather as the silly little games that she used to blame herself for losing. Freud ([1927] 1985: 166) characterizes the attitude of this latter subject-position in this way: “Look! Here is the world, which seems so dangerous! It is nothing but a game for children—just worth making a jest about!” It seems to me that this basic analysis is equally true whether we imagine those moral commands as coming from the superego or from society. For Freud, of course, this is a definition of humor in general, but I think it is more productive to view it as a definition of that particular form of humor that we call satire. This is because Freud describes humor as a form of rebellion or critique available to those who have no option but to speak the language of the situation that they wish to critique or subvert—something that to my ears sounds much more like a definition of satire in particular than of humor in general. We can now view the subject of satire as an amoral subject: she underidentifies with herself as a moral subject, but equally overidentifies with the moral commands that she used to take seriously. This, then, is my working definition—that overidentification with the moral order is the fundamental operation of satire.

V. This definition of satire, I wish to stress, is not an attempt to come up with a comprehensive or exhaustive understanding of every speech act that could be called satirical. Rather, with it, I seek to establish what could be called the properly satirical quality of such speech acts. It is thus an ideal type definition. The point about this type of definition is that it allows us to isolate one particular aspect of reality that we would not otherwise be able to see. In this

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way, one can claim that most satirical works do indeed come with a moral message, which is probably true. My claim, however, would be that their properly satirical quality is their ability to subvert morality from within, to make fun of morality without at the same time drawing up the contours of another moral universe. The strength of this particular definition is that it allows us to see satire as a universal human ability that is not contingent upon any particular circumstances. This point seems particularly important to stress in relation to the Charlie Hebdo event, after which a lot of discussion has tended to reproduce a dubious ‘us’ versus ‘them’ thinking. Here, the question has been whether we should insist on ‘our’ moral right to offend everything sacred even though ‘they’ might not like it, or whether we should be more sensitive to ‘their’ feelings—a formulation which seems to rely on the notion that ‘we’ can produce satire because we belong to a moral universe that is different from ‘theirs’. This viewpoint consequently construes satire as a particular expression of morality rather than a universal subversion of it. Consider, for example, an article entitled “The Limits of Satire” by literature professor Tim Parks (2015), which appeared in the New Yorker in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo event. “Crucial to satire,” Parks states, “is the appeal to supposed ‘common sense’ and a shared moral code. The satirist presents a situation in such a way that it appears grotesque and the reader who, whatever his or her private interests, shares the same cultural background and moral education agrees that it is so.” As his main example of this kind of satire, Parks quotes from Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, in which Swift critiques the economic inequalities of his time by suggesting— monstrously—that the poor should sell their children to the rich as food, as “a young healthy child well nursed,

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is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.” Everyone who reads this, Parks argues, “is made aware of a simple principle we all share: you don’t eat children, even Irish children, even Catholic children. So, if those children are not to be left to starve, something else in Ireland will have to give” (ibid.). Contrarily, Parks argues, the problem with a Parisian weekly magazine making fun of Muslims is that those Muslims will not share the laïcité sentiment that it is acceptable to make fun of everything that is sacred. Cartoons in Charlie Hebdo might therefore be hilarious satire to a Frenchman but an insult to a pious Muslim. Leaving aside the fact that Parks completely misreads the logic of Jonathan Swift’s text—which, rather than reminding everyone of some zero-level morality that we all supposedly share, is intended to have the reader overidentify with the logic of inequality and follow it to its logical conclusion, thus demonstrating the ambiguity inherent in what we take to be common-sense morality (i.e., the fact that the same people who defend inequality will also be against eating children)—the problem that I have with Parks’s definition is that, starting from it, satire seems to be able to convince us only of what we already take to be true. This makes it hard to understand why anyone would go through the trouble of producing satire in the first place. After all, if satire functions by appealing to a supposed common sense, why not just state that common sense directly? What is more, Parks’s definition demands that we view morality as basically coherent and shared—and that ‘the limit of satire’ coincides with the limit of this or that moral community. Differently put, this interpretation means that satire is intended to affirm a particular moral order and cannot translate across moral orders. However, as I have argued, since satire undermines the logic of morality from within, this is exactly what it can do.

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VI. Bringing this definition into a contemporary context, the American stand-up comedian Louis CK provides what in my view is a more or less quintessential example of this satirical logic in a number called “Of Course But Maybe.”3 In it, he begins by pointing out that “everybody has a competition in their brain: the good thoughts and the bad thoughts,” saying that, for him, “It’s become a category in my brain that I call ‘of course but maybe.’” He gives an example: “Of course, children who have nut allergies need to be protected—of course! We have to segregate their food from nuts, have their medication available at all time, and anybody who manufactures or serves food needs to be aware of deadly nut allergies. Of course! But maybe … Maybe if touching a nut kills you, you’re supposed to die. Of course not, of course not—I have a nephew who has that; I’d be devastated if something happened to him. But maybe … maybe if we all just do this for one year [puts his hand over his eyes] we’re done with nut allergies forever.” He then goes on to give more examples, such as, “Of course slavery was the worst thing that ever happened,” only to offer another “But maybe ….” What happens here, then, is precisely that Louis CK overidentifies with the moral order and underidentifies with himself as a moral actor. He looks at himself from the perspective of the moral order—the “good thoughts” and the “of course,” or, in Freud’s terms, the superego— and laughs at the fact that he cannot seem to identify fully with the moral commands that are placed upon him. There is always a “maybe,” a dark thought of complete immorality. In this way, the whole thing is a kind of inverted or redoubled confession, in which Louis CK is at once the sinner who confesses and the priest who forgives—with the result, I think, that the superego/moral

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order is simultaneously identified with and deconstructed, in terms of it being a severe master. In other words, what Louis CK presents us with is not the ego projection of a perfect moral order that we humans (sinners as we are) cannot successfully internalize. Rather, what we get is a moral order that we humans have at once produced and are completely unable to take seriously. Thus, what from an ego perspective would be experienced as an embarrassing gap between the self as a moral agent and the moral order as an external command is now seen as a gap internal to the subject. Furthermore, this gap is funny rather than shameful, since the failure is no longer that we cannot live up to serious moral commands but that we are not able to construct any commands that we can take seriously in the first place. In this sense, I actually quite enjoy those Charlie Hebdo cartoons that depict Islamic terrorists as non-believers. Here, it seems to me, the point is not so much that it should be acceptable to make fun of everything that is sacred, which always seems to mean everything that is sacred to someone else and, further, is little more than an ego projection, only now it is someone else who is supposed to believe (in the moral order/superego commands). Instead, in these cartoons, the point is that the terrorists are not really serious about their fundamentalism in the first place, and therefore, in Freud’s terms, “can appear tiny and all [their] interests trivial,” rather than monstrous ‘others’ (cf. Žižek 2015).

VII. Returning, then, to the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag, this is how I read it: as a way of neutralizing the amoral, and thus morally subversive, character of the very thing that one

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is defending, namely, satire. In his analysis of the Charlie Hebdo event, Alain Badiou nicely captures this paradox (see Watson 2015), stating: “The confusion reached its climax when we saw the state calling on people to come and demonstrate—in true authoritarian style. Here in the land of ‘freedom of expression’, we have a demo at the state’s command! We might even wonder if Valls thought about imprisoning the people who didn’t show up for it. Here and there people were punished for not going along with the one minute’s silence.” The state, in other words, orchestrated a massive superego spectacle in which everyone was called to identify as a particular kind of moral subject—“I am Charlie”—in order to defend something that is meaningful only as long as it refuses to be moral. Thus, by equating Charlie Hebdo with the superego injunction to confess one’s fidelity to the moral order—that is, by equating the amoral subject of satire with the moral subject of the state—the defense of Charlie Hebdo came at the price of killing the only thing worth saving in that magazine. Of course, this opposition between the amoral subject of satire and the moral subject of the state is also somewhat ideal typical. This, however, is exactly what I mean by “the only thing worth saving.” Often, if not most of the time, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons have in my view not represented anything worth saving. Instead, they only seem to reproduce the same moral universe in which the superego state (together with its demonstrating subjects) can imagine itself as defending French national space and universal human values, all at the same time—desecrating someone else’s moral universe only to draw up the contours of another (e.g., the Enlightened Republic). We may quote Charb, the murdered editor of Charlie Hebdo, who in an interview two years earlier stated: “Mohammed isn’t sacred to me. I don’t blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings. I

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live under French law. I don’t live under Quranic law” (see Burke 2015)—in other words, I live in the good moral order (of French law and citizenry, in which our satire is funny), not in the bad one (of Sharia law and Muslims, in which it is not). In this way, despite their pretentions of being outrageously satirical, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons—just like the defense of them—often turn out to be moral, all-too moral (to paraphrase Nietzsche). Still, it may be worthwhile to note here the origins of Charlie Hebdo. The magazine came into being immedi­ately after a previous weekly, Hara-Kiri Hebdo, was banned for having made fun of the death of President Charles de Gaulle. The name Charlie Hebdo is a satirical reference to de Gaulle: ‘the Charles de Gaulle weekly’ (Hebdo is short for hebdomadaire, or ‘weekly’). An ironic identification with a dead man whose death was thought of as a joke can only be described as something of a purely negative act—a negation of negation of negation. If it is a name that says “I am,” it does so only in order to undermine iden­tity, to take the amoral responsibility of being ethically open (a responsibility that, even though not always taken by Charlie Hebdo, is well worth celebrating). To say “I am Charlie,” however, is unfortunately to say the opposite: it is to identify as a particular moral person, to hand over one’s ethical responsibility to the moral community. It is identitarian and closed when the only way to be the subject of satire is to be continually open. For this reason, I would suggest in conclusion that the main problem with the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag might not be that it orchestrated a moral identification with “a racist publication” (Seymour 2015), even though in many ways it did. The main problem might instead be that it orchestrated a moral identification at all. Consequently, claiming not to be Charlie in the name of a more inclusive freedom of speech (in which criticism of speech is included) seems

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to be falling into the same trap of defending speech only to the extent that it is moral. In this sense, the enduring political tragedy following from the Paris killings might well be the instrumentalization of satire—not simply that of Charlie Hebdo but of satire as such—for the production of a moral subject under the state.

VIII. There is a wonderful scene at the end of The Catcher in the Rye in which Holden imagines himself in a rye field together with thousands of kids “playing some game” (Salinger [1951] 1994: 224). On the edge of the field is a great cliff, and it is Holden’s job to make sure that none of the kids fall off (this is what makes him ‘the catcher in the rye’). This scene comes to mind here. The kids in the rye field, I think, represent the moral order, which “is nothing but a game for children” (to again quote Freud). However, it is at the same time a very dangerous game, because if you get too caught up in it—if you take it too seriously— you run the risk of falling very far. I imagine that those same kids filled the streets of Paris the day after the Charlie Hebdo murders, and I imagine that Holden, had he been there, would have tried to convince them that identifying with the superego state is the wrong way to salvage satire. In his own words, “if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them” (Salinger [1951] 1994: 225).

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Jacob Hjortsberg is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen and is currently conducting research as part of the Egalitarianism project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC). In his research, he looks at urban planning and architecture in Singapore and China, focusing on the construction of so-called eco-cities. One of his main interests is the question of the commons— particularly the capitalist commons—and how it is at once integral and antagonistic to urban planning projects. He received his BA and MA from the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University.

Notes 1. Wrongly attributed to Voltaire, this saying was penned by his twentieth-century biographer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, who wrote it to characterize Voltaire’s views. In its original form, which is a little more moderate, it says: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” 2. Dyab Abou Jahjah’s tweet can be viewed at https://twitter.com/ aboujahjah/status/553169081424420864. 3. “Of Course But Maybe—Oh My God,” YouTube, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=KFwBH2fb2E0 (accessed 19 May 2015).

References Burke, Myles. 2015. “How Charlie Hebdo Editor Stéphane Charbonnier Stood Up to Terror.” Telegraph, 4 February. http://www. telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11331658/HowCharlie-Hebdo-editor-Stephane-Charbonnier-stood-up-to-terror. html (accessed 19 May). Canfield, Jacob. 2015. “In the Wake of Charlie Hebdo, Free Speech Does Not Mean Freedom from Criticism.” Hooded Utilitarian,

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7 January. http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2015/01/in-thewake-of-charlie-hebdo-free-speech-does-not-mean-freedom-fromcriticism/. Critchley, Simon. 2007. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso. Freud, Sigmund. [1927] 1985. “Humour.” Pp. 426–433 in Sigmund Freud, Art and Literature, ed. Albert Dickson. London: Penguin. Kubrick, Stanley, dir. 1960. Spartacus. Film, 184 min., Byrna Productions. Packer, George. 2015. “The Blame for the Charlie Hebdo Murders.” New Yorker, 7 January. http://www.newyorker.com/news/newsdesk/blame-for-charlie-hebdo-murders (accessed 19 May). Parks, Tim. 2015. “The Limits of Satire.” New York Review of Books, 16 January. http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/ jan/16/charlie-hebdo-limits-satire/. Salinger, J. D. [1951] 1994. The Catcher in the Rye. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Seymour, Richard. 2015. “On Charlie Hebdo.” Jacobin, 7 January. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-islamophobia/ (accessed 19 May). Watson, Mike. 2015. “The Red Flag and the Tricolore by Alain Badiou.” Verso Blog, 3 February. http://www.versobooks.com/ blogs/1833-the-red-flag-and-the-tricolore-by-alain-badiou. Žižek, Slavoj. 2015. “Are the Worst Really Full of Passionate Intensity?” New Statesman, 10 January. http://www.newstatesman. com/world-affairs/2015/01/slavoj-i-ek-charlie-hebdo-massacreare-worst-really-full-passionate-intensity (accessed 19 May).

On Blasphemy The Paradoxes of Protecting and Mocking God

k Theodoros Rakopoulos

Until very recently, Norway had in place a law that criminalized swearing against the divine, although it had been rarely used. Specifically, the last time that Article 142 of the Norwegian Criminal Code was put to use was to prosecute the author Arnulf Øverland, a communist who described Christianity as “the tenth plague,” in turbulent times in 1933. Article 142 was not removed from the Criminal Code until early in 2015, as an immediate response to the horrible events at the Charlie Hebdo headquarters. One might not have expected that Scandinavian legal frameworks would allow for the codification of blasphemy as a felony, but the social life of the legal and juridical fields is often laden with surprises. After all, the jural field is a setting of technical knowledge, theoretically available to everyone but in practice the realm of the few.1 This short piece will attempt to discuss the enduring event of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and its grievous aftermath by revisiting a discussion that precedes and frames the event itself. Focusing on the legal codification of blasphemy (i.e., the criminal act of defying or ridiculing God in public or private social life), the article will elucidate

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an often underdiscussed aspect of the violence permeating the event. The piece thus suggests that blasphemy is an odd yet complex junction of socio-cultural problematics in Western jural culture that can often yield issues in its interpretation, especially when it comes to humor and satire. To that avail, the article also touches on the disciplinary aspect of satire, a quasi-penalizing form of discourse that operates sometimes in lieu of the rule of law.

Blasphemy as a Crime against Nobody In Jewish and in Islamic law there are clear guidelines about blasphemy, as there are in secular legislatures. Blasphemy is thus an offense in some jurisdictions but not in others. The interesting thing about blasphemy is that it is a crime with no subject, according to contemporary legal theory. The logic is that of the causal relation between the generality of positive law and the specifics of material reality. Crimes are constituted on the grounds of the violation of liberties and rights or entitlements of a subject (e.g., a person) or an object (e.g., a house) or a ‘commons’ (e.g., a forest). God, runs the argument, is none of the above—certainly not a subject, never mind an object or a commons. What is more, God would be in no need of legal protection regardless of whether S/He exists or not. His/Her brilliance requires no reduction to the textuality of law or the materiality of the forces of law. Any admittance of a need for protection by these institutions would imply a sheer secularization of the divinity, subordinating Her/Him to the state. If God does exist, the canons of monotheistic religions claim that S/He is above all such petty stuff like subjects, objects, and commons. In Abrahamic religions, He is omniscient and omnipresent. He is thus by definition in no need

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of human protection and, it follows, is put outside the realm of legal critique. If He does not exist—and, indeed, we cannot prove the existence of a/any god in any positivist, affirmative fashion—there is no constitution of a crime anyway. If He does exist, He is too magnificent to care about such petty crime. All this sounds fair and commonsensical to the lay liberal mind, despite the technicality of the jargon pertaining to the legal codification of blasphemy in each legislature. Yet it also reveals puzzling inconsistencies in the relation between the divine and the earthly institutions of human associationism. These paradoxes in the relation between God and state come full circle in the case of France’s discussion of the jurisprudence regarding blasphemous satire. Specifically, there is a history to the recent reactions to Charlie Hebdo’s satire. Nearly a decade ago, the magazine’s editors, in an event of satire toward the Prophet, expressed collegial solidarity with another humorous magazine—an action that eventually escalated into a legal and jural precedent. When the Jyllands-Posten, a Danish daily, published some controversial caricatures of Mohammed in September 2005, Charlie Hebdo republished the ‘blasphemous’ material in February 2006. The outrage that followed was nothing like the massacre in early 2015. However, it did set a stage: Muslim associations sued the magazine. The courts in Paris ruled against the associations, setting another precedent. The jural reasoning argued that, according to the laïcité (i.e., secularity) principle, respect for all religions needs to be backed by the freedom to critique each and every one of them (Berkowitz and Eko 2011: 76). Moreover, there was a specific mention of the fact that, although the cartoons might be offensive to Muslims, they did not contain a slur against them as individuals or as members of a group or a culture.

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The main problem here with constituting an abstract normative principle that can be enforced by the instruments of the state apparatus (i.e., by laws) is twofold. On the one hand, this is, legally speaking, a faux crime—a felony where no real person, right, or thing has been violated. On the other hand, should the High Court acknowledge a subject whose rights were offended by blasphemy, it would be detrimental to the very functioning of secularism itself. It would mean that the rule of secularized French law implicitly recognizes the existence of (a) god. In other words, if blasphemy is legitimate, it would mean that the state affirmatively argues that god does exist. And if the rule of law officially recognizes that god exists, then the resulting problems of inequality would be mounting. One can only imagine what could happen to atheists or followers of non-godly religious dogmas should the state officially recognize the undeniable existence of a god, and indeed a god who needs to be protected. While secularism operates on the principle of eliminating the possibility of a/any god as an agent bearing rights and entitlements, within positive law there is a different story to be told about religion and the need to protect it. The realm of legal positivism, which reigns in all integrated contemporary legal systems but the Anglosphere, has little patience with the categorization of blasphemy as a legitimate crime. It would thus be an altogether different argument when religion itself is a matter of sarcasm and offense.

Paradoxes of the Secular State … Can we legally separate god from religion? Yes, one could actually say that this is the definition of secularism. Positivist legal systems have found ways to criminalize official slurs against religious dogmas, credos, and cultures.

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However, while this works as a legal reasoning, it puzzles the believers: how can their belief in a God be protected, but their God not? Secularism assumes what is still, and will always be, an unfinished process, that is, putting the belief in God out of the social—in other words, admitting religion as an aspect of social life while exiling God outside it. Therein lies a great paradox, rooted in the methodology of legal positivism, which is characterized by the methodological individualism of the modern state. The conflation between god and religion, an everyday praxis for most people, religious or not, reveals the troubles of the secular dogma. This illustrates that disassociating god from the criminal code by doubting the possibility of a god is an outcome of quite some reasoning. It lies at an assumed great divide between god and society (pace Durkheim) and becomes possible only by presuming that the individual is the bearer of law. Rather than appreciating the holistic aspect of life, wherein god and religion are inseparable and indeed intrinsic to social life and personhood, secularism stands alongside what are essentially ‘individual beliefs’ and sees religious and godly pursuits as part of individual choice. Can this approach, however, work for non-secularized societies? There is a different kind of godly presence in Islam, where holism reigns supreme. It pays to follow up on secularist thinking, as it might help to make sense of what blasphemy means to those who oppose vehemently, or violently, any attempt to satirize their religious beliefs. For them, satire is perceived as a mockery of a way of life and, indeed, a cosmology. The secularist principle of dissociating god from society rests on the notion that the moral agent can stand outside society as the individual bearing rights and entitlements. The cartoonist, or the satirist at large, operates as the epitome of such an idealized modern agent.

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… and of Satire Humor often works as a disciplinary normativity for those members of secular society not fully ‘encompassed’ by the secular principle. In that respect, it is telling that religion and religious belief seem to be the laughing stock (literally) for stand-up comedy. A series of atheist stand-up comedians who come from Christian and Jewish denominations—ranging from George Carlin to Lewis Black, Billy Connolly to Louis CK, Lenny Bruce to Bill Hicks, and Ricky Gervais to Billy Burr—have found in organized religion, as well as religious dogma and divine belief, their stomping ground and their punch line. The separation principle of secularism (you can mock God because He is different from religion) is operating here on a methodology called ‘observational comedy’. I think this makes for an interesting point about the radical individualism of the secular state. The satirical and scornful observations of these comedians, who most often ridicule how ‘stupid’ believing in God is, function as a form of surveillance of those not fully included in the secular realm. As active agents, satirists are slightly detached from organized society, working their way as a Socratic gadfly. These individuals take on the dire deed and responsibility of reminding us how ill-advised it is to deviate from the principles of secularism. In this way, comedy conveys a subtly disciplinary mechanism: by commenting on what is observed, it urges us to reframe our moral field according to principles that have been forgotten or set aside. Interestingly, the fact that comedians live among us and participate in our common lives, while observing and remarking on what we do, reminds us of something that we hold dear: our own discipline, anthropology. Satire and humor thrive in dangerous and extremely liminal spaces, in that they are suspended in ambiguous

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conceptual areas in between firm convictions. However, by satirizing ‘democratically’, that is, by sharing the scorn equally among different social groups, the participant observer comedian obfuscates social inequalities and presents differing perceptions of scorn for the divine, seen by some as blasphemy. Transcultural satire and inter-denominational scorn has been, since Montesquieu’s Persian Letters ([1721] 1973), directed more toward the powerful than the weak. Montesquieu used the figure of the Persian wanderer as a parodic hyperbole to make France reflect on her faults, as Jonathan Swift did similarly in Britain. The enlightening aspect of Montesquieu’s satire was shaped by a system of critique to power—a critique that was in fact exogenous to power. In Montesquieu, or indeed prior to his agenda in the works of essayist Michel de Montaigne, one finds the critical gaze applied via satire toward conventional European customs. Montesquieu assumes an exogenous identity, that of two Persian travelers to Europe, who, through epistles, report back home to their Muslim brothers about what the French are made of. The external gaze and the satirical mimicry it evokes are refreshing. Its satire reflects sympathy with the Muslim wanderers and empathy with the Europeans whom the travelers observed and reported on. Maybe that exogenous gaze is a prototype of a participant observation that is satirical yet not normative.

Limits to Critique’s Secularism? There is not much point or space here to reiterate Bruce Kapferer’s suggestions in the afterword (this volume), but I think that what Islamic critique, even in its fundamentalist and moralistic version, raises is the issue of reopening whether the Western critique (including legal

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positivism and satire) is in fact secular or is actually based on an undercurrent of Christian values, as has already been suggested years before (Asad et al. 2009). The Charlie Hebdo event exposes the ‘cannots’ of such Western values and furthers the West’s assumption of dominance. This is not about discussing the limitations of secular critique; rather, it is more about exploring the limits to the secularism of critique. This essay has examined, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo event and the discussions and legal activity that preceded and followed it, what constitutes blasphemy. Debating the social life of legislation that ‘protects’ God, we have briefly tackled one of modernity’s contradictions—the condition when the liberal, secular state is called on to frame a protection of God’s rights in society and separate god from religion. The article has also touched on this differentiation between God and religion and how the latter (or rather the ensemble of its followers) appears as a different jural story altogether. No discussion over modernity can fully capture this subtle life of the law until we recognize that it is not God who needs protection, but those who believe in Him/Her.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank my friend Stergios Mitas, whose work on the philosophy of law has influenced this article. Without his bringing the specifics of the French jural case to my attention, this piece would not have been written. Thanks also to Bruce Kapferer for general guidance and to my colleagues in the Social Anthropology Department at the University of Bergen for commenting on earlier drafts.

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Theodoros Rakopoulos is a Research Fellow in the ERCfunded Egalitarianism program within the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Goldsmiths College and previously worked as a Research Fellow in the Human Economy Programme at the University of Pretoria. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in rural Sicily and urban Greece. His research interests include cooperatives, solidarity, and ‘truth activism’. He has published in journals of anthropological and regional interest and is currently completing a monograph provisionally titled “Divided by Land: Labor and Moralities in Sicilian Antimafia Cooperatives.”

Notes 1. Laws are ‘commons’ by definition (cf. Nonini 2007). In fact, one of modernity’s incongruities, and indeed myths of the people (à la Kapferer 2011), is that the rule of law, as well as the legal domain (the Civil and Criminal Codes and the Constitution), is one of the few commons. This is despite the fact that accessing and fully understanding it is a matter of onerous specialized activity.

References Asad, Talal, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. 2009. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press. Berkowitz, Dan, and Lyombe Eko. 2011. “Blasphemy as Sacred Rite/Right: The Mohammed Cartoons Affair” and Maintenance of Journalistic Ideology.” Pp. 67–82 in Cultural Meanings of News: A Text-Reader, ed. by Daniel A. Berkowitz. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Kapferer, Bruce. 2011. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. New York: Berghahn Books. Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de. [1721] 1973. The Persian Letters. Trans. C. J. Betts. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nonini, Donald, ed. 2007. The Global Idea of ‘the Commons.’ New York: Berghahn Books. Vol. 10 of the Critical Interventions series.

Afterword When Is a Joke Not a Joke? The Paradox of Egalitarianism

k Bruce Kapferer

The Charlie Hebdo event is defined by acts whose very dynamic form—humor and violence—is that of excess where human existential realities are brought to the point of their collapse and perhaps to their point of renewal. Humor and violence are about human existence at its limits; in many ways they share an identity, or reveal an identity, in the process. In Charlie Hebdo they achieved force in the context of global realities that increasingly are perceived to be without limitation and in the coils of their own excesses: where capital is without constraint, where value has no value, where corruption is rife, where rival fundamentalisms hold sway, where all has become one state of exception in which war and misery reign. The event of Charlie Hebdo refracts a world in virtual apocalyptic crisis. The spectacle of the Charlie Hebdo event, the event as spectacle in this society of the spectacle, had every ingredient of the theater of the absurd, its marriage of comedy and tragedy ending in an explosion of violent bloody death. But here, in Charlie Hebdo, art certainly became life, Artaud and Debord rolled into one. The ‘deep play’ of its theater whereby the public became absorbed and a participant in its process was because everything seemed

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to be at stake. For a moment, Charlie Hebdo became the world, and there was no separation between symbol and reality, each realizing the apocalyptic potency of the other. During the event, the imaginary of the mutual extinction of the clash of civilizations joined with the specter of Europe’s nightmare of guilt, the Holocaust. These are among the images that gathered symbolic force at the start and the finish of Charlie Hebdo. For all its grim course, the Charlie Hebdo event also had an air of the Kantian sublime. Its dynamic of extremes—the cartoons and the final killings—resulted in a volcanic eruption of the collapse and renewal of reason. There is a crazy sacrificial quality about the event of Charlie Hebdo where death generates life, as Hubert and Mauss (1964) �famously discussed: the event of sacrifice creates a tensional space between life and death out of which something new emerges. The killers knew they would probably die and willingly risked their lives in the expectation of bloody sacrifice. Likewise, the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were aware that their lives were in danger (and the etymology of Hebdo has ritualistic connotations). The public enthusiasm at the close of the event had all the joy of resurrection about it— even, I hesitate to add, a sense of the carnivalesque. The public’s dominant and quite explicit mood was a triumphalist affirmation of European and North American democratic egalitarian value and, by extension, its rightful force in global realities. The essays in this volume all take this viewpoint to task, as well they might. The introduction sets the tone, concentrating on the expanding neo-imperial and neo-liberal global situation, one of growing chaos in which chaos itself is a means of domination. Charlie Hebdo is an intensification of this process, an exemplar of the risk of the politics of identity amid forces of insularization and marginalization of minorities—Muslims specifically, as in the banlieues of Paris—and the articles expand on these

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points. Charlie Hebdo, especially with regard to the conjunctures of Europe and the US with the Middle East and North Africa in war and migration, was an event waiting to happen. It fits with a long, unfolding historical narrative. Yes! Yes! I hear myself saying. Some of the contributions concentrate on the racialization of realities that the Charlie Hebdo event expresses. There are fascinating contemplations on blasphemy, humor, satire, and notions of ‘pure tolerance’ and free speech and how they work in the interests of power and domination. Underlying the volume and its critique as a whole is what may be termed the ‘crisis of egalitarianism’. Realities founded in egalitarian democracy seem to be confounding egalitarian ideologies at every turn, and the Charlie Hebdo event is an outstanding example. There is a mood of wary cynicism or of entrapment in the iron cage that settles over most of the articles, although this largely cannot be avoided in critique where the positive is in the negative. Through critique, what appears to be inevitable may be overcome. This is the spirit of many popular movements and processes today throughout the globe, and their mood is most definitely egalitarian. It is an ethos of egalitarianism that yields the sense that the apparently inevitable is avoidable. In many ways, the constructivism of anthropology, often under attack these days, has embedded a strong egalitarian sense. As Marshall Sahlins (1981) pursues in his classic analysis of ancient Hawaii on the cusp of globalizing modernity (which he writes about as a kind of descent, congruent with the feeling here), the determinations of the event are in its construction. That is, it is through the construction of the event, and in its definition of the situation (see McHugh 1968), that it is conceived to be determined and is given a determining effect in ongoing processes. So although I do not disagree with the general thrust of these

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essays, I want to ask whether there is something crucial to the event as constructed by the contributors that has been missed or rather has not been brought sufficiently to the surface. I have already begged the answer in the question. This concerns the matter of egalitarianism that is absolutely overt in the Charlie Hebdo event. The negative is largely stressed in these essays, but maybe some of the potentially positive aspects of egalitarianism are shining through from within the Charlie Hebdo event. I address the issue of egalitarianism with respect to the other major concern of the essays, that of humor and the joke. Necessarily, I cover some of the ground already trodden and draw on information and arguments in the articles but, I think, with a slightly different twist.

The Joke in the Structure The highly problematic question that all the contributions confront is, when is a joke not a joke? The essays are more or less united in the answer—when it is inappropriate, insensitive to context, out of line, without license. The Charlie Hebdo event, of course, gives this answer in its explosive ending. The butt of the joke refused the joke, denied passive acceptance of it, which the butt must do to be part of the community of the joke. However, the paradoxical thing about this is that the butt’s refusal of the joke is part of the joke, if not its very punch line, and is crucial to its enjoyment. Normally, the butts of jokes, or those who perceive themselves to be in that situation, do not kill the jokesters, although they certainly ban them, jail them, label them to be blasphemous or obscene. Even when the perpetrators of the joke are killed, the joke in essence still holds because—however cruel, racist, tragic in intention and consequence it may be—the joke has

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succeeded. It has revealed the very joke in the structure— in effect, the impossible intolerable contradictions at the heart of the realities that human beings construct. A joke can be funny even when it is not funny. The answer to the question, when is a joke not a joke? is, I contend, ultimately unanswerable. Even the question is a kind of joke—a thoroughgoing contradiction in terms. It is a moral query of a totally amoral form. To pose the question is to submit to the paradox of the joke, which is at the heart of its dynamic. This is part of the problematic for the essayists here (including myself), who are embroiled in the paradox of the very phenomenon being explored. The event of Charlie Hebdo is through and through the form of a joke. This is so from its initial framing1 as a joke to its explosive conclusion when the realm of the joke collapses against the impossible contradiction of its own logic. This is the realization of the joke that is simultaneously the ending of its surreality in the dissolution and breaking of its frame. At this point, the real—what subtends the joke and is the tension and excitement of the joke frame—floods in. The joke is a joke no more, although this flooding out of the joke is part of the joke as a joke. The killings and the emergence of the unbridled authority and power of the state, which brought the event to its fateful closure, were integral to the Charlie Hebdo event as a joke form. This can be seen as having a life (the realm of the joke) to death dynamic or even a life to death to life dynamic. Hence, the very emergence of that which has been suspended or suppressed or repressed in the sustaining of the tension of the joke frame can be the precise joke in the structure that is brought to the surface in the revelation of the joke’s end. So the closure of the joke becomes the very point that may give rise to yet another joke—indeed, a whole string of jokes. Thus, the English satirical journal Private Eye,2 the often no less subversive equivalent of Charlie Hebdo, published

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a special cartoon issue to mark the event,3 in itself somewhat ironic. The cover, under the title “World Leaders March for Freedom,” parodied the famous photograph, flashed around the global news services, of European and other world leaders demonstrating their solidarity with the spirit of freedom and free speech that Charlie Hebdo was taken to express. They declared Charlie Hebdo’s satire to be at the root of democracy, which they ideologically affirmed they would ring-fence and protect until the end. The photograph was republished with the bubble “Je suis Charlatan” over the leaders’ heads (fig. 1) in mockery of the cry “Je suis Charlie,” the almost spontaneous cry of the citizens of Paris as an expression of collective unity in support of the value of freedom. Private Eye revealed the joke in the structure, the hypocrisy of the hierarchs who, in their affirmation of democracy and freedom, hid the fact that they are the instruments of the daily subversion of these values. The very name Charlie Hebdo (with its reference to de Gaulle) encodes contradiction and perhaps the impossibility of any foundationally ultimate unity of power with democratic ideals—the zeugmatic yoking together of two different and in effect opposed terms. Private Eye’s observation was not the only joke in the structure: this was more than evidenced in the issue, which was packed with other cartoons, including ones that referred to the Western bombing and invasion of Islamic countries. The joke in the structure particularly noted in the essays here is that the collective declaration for democracy was announced in the context of the very anti-democratic foundation of the event. “Je suis Charlie” was founded in and gave rise to further exclusion and marginalization of people who felt themselves to be part of the one democratic union that the statement “Je suis Ahmed” expressed (and which the Muslim schoolboy who expressed it was pressured to retract). In other words, and by extension,

Figure 1 January 2015 Cover of Private Eye

Reproduced by kind permission of Private Eye magazine.

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the declaration of the value of democracy, whose central essence is equality, revealed itself to be founded in oppression and gross inequality. The reference here to equality underlines something that is under-addressed in the essays. It is far too obvious, I suppose, although clearly it is the tension underlying the contributions. The observation I now make concerns a matter that the contributors’ may have suppressed due to their concern to address the issues that are everywhere and crucially on the surface—that is, the essays obscure a joke in the structure of the realization of their own thought. This is that the Charlie Hebdo event occurred in Paris, the site of La Révolution and the founding of the Republic. The French Revolution is the symbol par excellence not only for subsequent revolutionary action in France, but almost every place of revolution in the world since. Here in Paris, equality (égalité) in public outrage exploded onto the streets and tumbled all before it. The ancien regime was through and through attacked: its cosmology; the entire hierarchical fabric of its socio-political world, power, and position; rights centered around the divinity of kingship, where the right to rule was based on birth in supportive pact with religion—all glitteringly reflected in a supreme concentration and display of wealth. The Revolution manifested the extreme, furious emancipatory intensity of equality ranged against the forces of tradition and its inequalities. Out of the flames of the Revolution the Republic was to arise, its foundation in equality and its ideals to be sustained in the Revolutionary slogan liberté, égalité, fraternité. This was also the slogan of the emancipatory slave revolution in Haiti that was to follow soon after. It is a slogan that carries the full force of the egalitarian concept. Égalité is the middle term in the triad: the one in three and the three in one.

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The French Revolution—arguably more so than the American Revolution, which it emulated and with which it is twinned (as Charlie Hebdo is with Twin Towers in the view of many)—is the founding egalitarian event in which equality was at the root of all things. It is, I hazard, the singular moment that not only shook the world but initiated the long historical critical and secular discourse of modernity—a discursive action of the people who wrested its monopoly from the control of elites. During the Revolution, hierarchy and equality were in annihilating relation, in a struggle to the death and beyond reason. For a moment, in the Terror, all those who dared to govern were to find themselves under the guillotine. In the American Revolution, the laws of reason are observed: reason becomes its condition. In the French Revolution, reason itself is thoroughly subordinated to or made dependent on equality as its foundation. The potencies behind the concept of equality are vital, I think, in order to fully fathom the emotional outpouring that appeared to unite the world in the immediate “Je suis Charlie” moment and that seemed to transcend any partisan ideology or specific interest. In the calm after the initial emotional outbursts of supportive sympathy for the murdered (after the Terror, as it were), more sober, reasoned reflections were expressed. Many of them were along the lines of those in these essays. It merits considering a little further a key reference of “Je suis Charlie” that is discussed in this collection. To repeat, it refers to a closing episode in Stanley Kubrick’s film Spartacus, about the leader of the slave revolt against Rome. The Spartacus revolt has been an inspiration for egalitarian movements in modern times. Rosa Luxemburg’s Spartacist socialist movement, tragically extinguished in 1919, is a famous instance, and there have been revivals in spirit since. In Kubrick’s film, the recaptured

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and manacled slaves are asked to reveal the identity of their leader—the embodiment of their freedom—in return for which they will not be crucified. But they rise in solidarity, each declaring himself to be Spartacus. Thus, in choosing death, they exercise their free will. Moreover, they demonstrate that the power of the collective, even when it leads to death, is expressed in equality and freedom and that without these life is impossible. Life under the oppressive yoke of power is virtually no life at all. It is for life, for freedom in life, that they sacrifice their lives in crucifixion. Stéphane Charbonnier, editor and publisher of Charlie Hebdo, who was killed on the day of the event, had tragically expressed such sentiment in his statement “I’d rather die standing than live on my knees.” It had been given to Le Monde following the 2011 firebombing of the magazine offices and in defense of the right to caricature all religions. The utterance had been famously spoken by François-Noël “Gracchus” Babeuf in 1797 during his defense in the Conspiracy of Equals and has a history of similar radical application.4 There may be some irony in the adaptation of Kubrick’s Spartacus to the “Je suis Charlie” event. In light of all the evidence discussed, it is a complete inversion of the argument of the film. In the film, it is the slaves, the oppressed, who resist the master, those in the hierarchy of power. In the “Je suis Charlie” moment, it is the other way around. But let us try to suspend this understanding for the moment, however true it is. The emotions that the “Je suis Charlie” moment unleashed are likely to have been many, given the extraordinary scale of the occasion—not just the murders and the final shootings, but the state’s action in closing down much of Paris and its environs. There are numerous sentiments that are likely to have been personally expressed: a sense of shock at the murders in themselves; a wish to

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engage in collective grief (without any ideological value necessarily attached to it); a concern to acknowledge in collective action the loss of well-known public figures, admired for their satirical work in most areas of French political life; an aim to place on show a desire for the return to public life, which had been so radically disrupted by the shootings and then shut down by the overriding power of the state; or an interest to declare in common and publicly a loyalty to the Republican value in defiance of the oppressive force of state power. This does not exclude the sentiments of right-wing extremists, who undoubtedly saw the Charlie moment as an occasion to express their anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant views, despite having been targeted by Charlie Hebdo’s satire (see BBC 2015). The great multiplicities of sentiments that could have assembled under the banner “Je suis Charlie” were erased in the very process of the construction of a happening (in Sahlins’s approach) into an event. The event of Charlie Hebdo comes to have essentially one meaning: France, the world, is under threat from Islam. It is an instance of radical synecdoche. That is, the parts of society that experience the inegalitarianism of the egalitarian crisis—Islamic value and French Muslims— come to manifest the totality of the egalitarian crisis, both in representation and in cause. “Je suis Ahmed” is the voice of drowning. Its pathos is even more profound than its intense and tragic sense of exclusion, resulting in the political marginalization of French Muslims and their experience of being constantly attacked over the values that bond them in identity (see BBC 2015). The deeper profundity of “Je suis Ahmed” is the suffocation of the spirit of egalitarianism and democracy itself. It is the appearance of the suppressed dimension of the Charlie moment as one of egalitarian desire that I suspect was also at the heart of the enthusiastic ardor of

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the moment. But this was subordinated in the synecdoche of the construction of the meaningful integrity of the event. In other words, the construction of the Charlie Hebdo event, potentially compounded in those analyses and interpretations that accepted its terms, obscures multiple dimensions of the egalitarian energy that the event may express. Given the Republican context of Île de France, the “Je suis Charlie” moment may well have been a release of the tensions of egalitarianism, the full surfacing of the collective urgency for egalitarianism at a time of its intense and manifold contradiction and suppression. This is so in a context (as described in this volume) where the life of the citizen, if only for a brief time, was closed down so completely by the apparatuses of the state. In complete contradiction of its egalitarian and Republican consciousness, the state, in this land of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, manifested its awe-ful anti-egalitarian potency. (Perhaps this was implicitly recognized by state leaders themselves, their declaration for Charlie being a disclosure and a performative release of self-realization concerning their own contradictory implication.) The return to life and its affirmation, which the Charlie moment indicated, attained significance as a point of closure, drawing its enthusiasm, I suspect, from the collective knowledge that egalitarianism was under general threat in all quarters of life. This, I contend, was integral to the emotional upsurge. The mood of the ending and the form of the whole Charlie Hebdo event have features that two of the classic theorists of humor and the joke—Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson—would detect. For Freud (1916), the enjoyment of the joke is in the exhilaration of the release of tension and the revelation of something repressed. Bergson ([1900] 1935: 27) understands humor and the laughter it evokes to be in the perception of “something mechanical encrusted on something living” or the insistence of life,

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its flow, fluidity, and freedom against all that would deny, restrict, and overdetermine its essence, revealing the absolute absurdity of the refusal of life. The “Je suis Charlie” ending of the event has a hint of the joyous verging on the carnivalesque, although mixed with a deep sense of sadness. There is a slight celebratory air about it, and this is appropriate, given the context of the Charlie moment as conceived: a memorialization of the dead cartoonists and especially the vow to continue the egalitarian spirit that they were held to uphold. This egalitarianism is believed to assert the value of life—indeed, the continuity of life—in the midst of the grimmest circumstances. It is a spirit that overcomes the very forces, born in the contradictions of egalitarianism, that would deny it. On reflection in the aftermath, what many commentators have found the most difficult is the declaration of the tight connection between satire and egalitarianism. This is especially so because the satire seemed to give rise to forces that are thoroughly anti-egalitarian and counter to democratic value. While that is undoubtedly the case, as the essays here demonstrate, the event provoked many into a deep consideration of the assumptions and values of the kind of democratic realities that we are inhabiting, the observation being that democracy is in foundational contradiction of itself. This is the great crisis of egalitarianism in the current historical moment, and the Charlie Hebdo event embodies it, as the contributors to this volume sharply present. There is a suggestion that one expression of the crisis, the loss of democratic value, is to be detected in satire itself, and there is huge moral condemnation of this.5 There can be no doubt that Charlie Hebdo is the perfect example of satire’s great danger and risk. Nonetheless, and at some hazard, I wish to uphold certain aspects of the assertion, made at the end of the chaos of the Charlie

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Hebdo event, of the intimate connection between egalitarianism and satire—satire as virtually the soul of egalitarianism—and, moreover, satire of the no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners sort. Egalitarianism is deeply contradictory and perpetually locked in struggle with itself. It is virtually its own impossibility, as Rousseau highlights regarding the irresolute contradiction of the state-society relation. Inegalitarianism is the enduring potential of egalitarianism’s other side, the many-headed Hydra that continually springs up against egalitarianism in the moment of egalitarianism itself. There is a madness in egalitarianism as there is a madness for it, especially once it is cogently materialized and concretized in the form of a concept (égalité) that can be held up as a firm ideal, as it was in immediate pre-Revolutionary France, the veritable birthplace of the concept. The magnificence of the idea and also its impossibility are manifested in the great event of La Révolution itself. The impossibility is starkly apparent in the madness of the Terror, a rage that in the urgency to attain the ideal of egalitarianism, equality as the foundation of reason, saw instances of inegalitarianism at every turn—so much so that the new life and its conditions to which the egalitarian idea gave birth, as the world of its virtually infallible reasoning, foundered against itself. What I am saying is that egalitarianism is its own joke in the structure of the realities it imagines into existence. It is its own danger as much as its own magnificence. There is practically no limit to egalitarianism, save that of the inegalitarianism that must rise in the smooth space of the world that egalitarianism in its most extreme manifestation intends and that it is destined to cut down. Satire is the handmaiden of egalitarianism and, as I will briefly indicate, shares with egalitarianism the latter’s hope and danger. Moreover, satire is the complement or

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supplement to egalitarianism in the very reasoning of egalitarianism, especially in the context of Revolutionary and Republican France. So I elaborate a little to give more sense to what I am saying. I start with going over some moral ground. Satire is not only amoral (respects nothing) it is also outside all moral reason. Garry Trudeau (2015), the creator of the satirical cartoon strip Doonesbury, charged the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists with subverting the grand French tradition of satire (citing Molière and Daumier as examples, interestingly leaving out Rabelais) that “always punched up” and not “downward.” The Charlie Hebdo cartoons wandered into the realm of hate speech. True enough. But this opinion pushes satire toward the censor, toward its government—that is, its contradiction. David Frum (2015) responded, praising Trudeau’s American “liberal tradition” but querying the idea that satire should only punch up. Frum argues that satire should be in the service of victims whoever they may be, weak or strong, especially victims of violence. Trudeau and Frum express different sides of the one coin. They submit satire to the judgment of morality and aim to capture and domesticate it to the interests of a morality that, in both instances, is a non-violent liberal one. This, I note, was a definite ambience of the Charlie moment. But it hid an absurdity as Private Eye detected in the (in)famous photograph of European and world leaders, many of whom are the instruments of the more outrageous violent atrocities of recent times, committed in the name of democracy. Satire is more than amoral; it is anti-moralizing and relentlessly roots out and exposes all false claim and assertions of legitimacy. Indeed, satire attacks the very ground of morality and of legitimacy, ultimately questioning their foundations. Satire works from the position that morality and legitimacy (especially in combination) have

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no positive ground, that they are ungrounded. The outrageousness of satire explodes moralities and legitimacies. It is outside good and evil. In satire’s uncertain hands, all that is solid melts into air. When the good leaders of national governments gathered in support of the cartoonists and declared that the Charlie Hebdo magazine was the essence of democracy and freedom, in the context of the Revolution and Republican France they were at once right and wrong. They were right that satire is in close relation to egalitarianism but wrong to claim it, as they appeared to do, as a kind of servant to the state, helping to keep the states’ representatives straight, as it were, and to maintain the essentially moral order of the state. The egalitarian spirit of the Revolution was founded in the fundamental illegitimacy in nature of any necessary right to authority or to govern, of any such claim based on hierarchy or morality. Only egalitarianism, equality, has legitimacy in nature, not society or, especially, the state. Equality is pre-value, pre-ideological, the condition for what may follow. Egalitarianism is the only thing that is naturally legitimate, and it is thus upon equality that everything else rests. Society and the state are the jokes in the structure—or the joke of the structure—in a world of such egalitarian foundation. Their potential, especially that of the state, is to act against nature, to overturn equality that by itself is foundational in nature and upon which their existence paradoxically depends. Egalitarianism is the very basis of all reason and at the root of morality. In Hatred of Democracy, Jacques Rancière (2006), writing within the French Revolutionary and Republican tradition, elaborates upon what I am saying. He is concerned with the emergence of the political in the paradox of the democratic (effectively, the full emergence of the political in the democratic) and its foundation neither in reason nor in society. Democracy is indifferent to society in any

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singular or coherent sense. The society of democracy is a multiplicity. No one moral community has any necessary natural right over any other (Muslims over non-Muslims or vice versa), a matter which the Charlie Hebdo event threatened. That is, the expression of egalitarian community in reaction to the Charlie Hebdo event had, as the paradox of its effect, the very inegalitarian exclusion of French Muslims. With regard to the political, Rancière (2006: 46) asserts that human beings throughout history appear to have realized only three kinds of entitlements or legitimations by which to govern: “the superiority of birth” (i.e., kinship and, by extension, divine kingship, but nationalism would be another); “the power of wealth”; and “the anarchic title.” It is this last that expresses the intolerable truth that there is no natural title. While government and power are without natural foundation, this is their foundation: the paradox of the anarchic title is at the heart of democracies. In democracy, the power that accrues from birth and wealth (and most political orders are oligarchies of such a mix) is submitted to the decision of all in the relation of equals (as with the lot in the Greek demos, a wager against inequality). The inequalities that are inevitable to the oligarchies formed under the sign of the democratic are ultimately founded on illegitimacy. The right to govern is awarded from the ground of equality, but the legitimacy of government is lost, as is democracy, when its claims to legitimacy are based on birth, wealth, or a singular ruling moral value, reflected in the return of the religious, as is increasingly the case these days. As Rancière puts it: “Democracy is first this paradoxical condition of politics, the point where every legitimization is confronted with its ultimate lack of legitimacy, confronted with the egalitarian contingency that underpins the inegalitarian contingency itself” (ibid.: 94).

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This speaks to the centrality of satire in egalitarianism. Satire pursues the fundamental egalitarian logic at the root of the democratic, which is that nothing has ultimate legitimacy or moral foundation save that of the a priori truth of equality itself (which also explains religion being the ruthless target of satire). Satire is the energy and the very instrument of the anarchic title. This is the force of satire in the realities formed within the democratic and, as with democracy itself, is its danger and risk—satire’s own inimitable paradox. What I have written here is only the start of a much larger conversation on egalitarianism that is part of a project I share with the contributors to this volume. Discussions with them and reading their work have inspired what I have very unsatisfactorily outlined here. Our joint endeavor must be critique, very much in the spirit of satire, incidentally, and thus fraught with danger. But I wanted, nonetheless, to finish on a slightly more positive note in these terrible times that the event of Charlie Hebdo represents, when much seems lost. Satire and the power of humor to attack all form, to destabilize all value, in its current use in much contemporary democratic society is sometimes interpreted as an index of the loss of all sense of value and morality. This is the message that I sometimes get from reading, for example, Jean Baudrillard’s (2010) The Agony of Power, a kind of extension of Oswald Spengler’s (1991) The Decline of the West, and many others. Rather than decline, the West (admittedly a most unsatisfactory term in these globalizing times) might be at the point of a new egalitarian turning, on the cusp of new egalitarian imaginings. Evidently, there are many positive happenings and murmurings in the world despite shades of self-defeating cynicism in the wake of the Iraq War and the frustrating impotency of the massive public protests against it, the

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failure of the Arab Spring, the disaster of Syria, the abjection of immigrants and refugees displaced by evermore wars, the seeming hopelessness of the current situation of Greece crushed in the vice of oligarchic power, and almost everywhere the impoverishing and radically inegalitarian effects of the moral authority of austerity and the rules of the economic. However, in the midst of the terrible there are glimmerings of things more positive, and satire can help to clear the ground for such an emergence. This is so even if there is always great risk in its effects. In the Charlie Hebdo event, tragic as it was, there was yet the emergence of the great spirit of egalitarianism, as I have tried to show, even in the shadow of the killings and the total submission of reality to the inordinate demands of power incarnate.

Bruce Kapferer is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and is currently Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Norway. He was affiliated with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (1963–1966) and was later appointed to the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester (1966–1973). He was subsequently Foundation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Adelaide and later at James Cook University, as well as Professor and Chair at University College London. He has held research fellowships at the Center for Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, and the National Humanities Center, North Carolina. His published books include A Celebration of Demons (1983), Legends of People, Myths of State (1988), The Feast of the Sorcerer (1997), and 2001 and Counting: Kubrick, Nietzsche, and Anthropology (2014). He has edited Beyond Rationalism (2002) and has co-edited Aesthetics in

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Performance (2005, with Angela Hobart), Crisis of the State (2009, with Bjørn Bertelsen), and In the Event: Toward an Anthropology of Generic Moments (2015, with Lotte Meinert. He was formerly joint editor of Anthropological Theory (2012–2015) and is chief editor of Social Analysis. He was Director of the Challenging the State project, supported by the Norwegian Research Foundation, and is currently Director of the Egalitarianism project at the University of Bergen funded by the EU under the ERC Advanced Grant Scheme. This involves an international team of researchers inquiring into historical and current egalitarian/inegalitarian social and political processes.

Notes 1. The idea of framing, or the joke frame, was initially developed by myself and Don Handelman (Handelman and Kapferer 1972), working from an idea of Gregory Bateson (1973) that was applied to the analysis of various play and humor situations (see also Handelman 1990; Kapferer 1983). Very rudimentarily, the argument is that particular actions such as jokes involve the establishment of an invisible frame—THIS IS A JOKE—similar to the frame that is used with cartoons. The purpose of the frame is to signal that everything that goes on within it is not to be reacted to seriously. Bateson’s example is in the play between human beings and dogs. When biting its owner, the dog signals that its action is not to be responded to as an actual act of aggression. 2. In many ways a satirical magazine of the English establishment, Private Eye manifests bemused skepticism. Charlie Hebdo is far more scurrilous and has none of the distanced and occasionally superior quality of Private Eye. 3. See “World Leaders March for Free Speech,” Private Eye 1384, 9 January 2015. 4. The Conspiracy of Equals (Conjuration des Égaux) was the French Revolutionary faction led by Babeuf (self-nicknamed Gracchus,

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after the radical and populist Roman tribunes), a vociferous defender of Robespierre and the Jacobins. Upon the execution of Robespierre, the Terror ended and the suppression of the Jacobins (the White Terror) began. Babeuf and his group maintained resistance, supporting Robespierre’s actions and attacking the leaders of the Thermidorian Reaction through Babeuf’s newspaper, Le Tribun du peuple. At his final arrest, the newspaper was ceremonially burnt by Thermidorian youth whose mission was to root out all Jacobins. The statement “I’d rather die standing than live on my knees” has a significant history, said by some to begin with Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound. “La Pasionaria” Dolores Ibárruri used the phrase in her speeches during the Spanish Civil War. It is said to have been used by Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution and in connection with the Zapatista movement, influenced by the anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón. 5. Some six months after the Charlie Hebdo event, the magazine’s succeeding editor, Laurent Sourisseau, said that cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad would no longer appear. He countered the appearance of having succumbed to moral pressure, stating in an interview with the German magazine Stern: “We’ve done our job. We have defended the right to caricature … We still believe that we have the right to criticize all religions.” See http://www. rt.com/news/310193-charlie-hebdo-editor-caricature/.

References Bateson, Gregory. 1973. “A Theory of Play and Fantasy.” Pp. 183– 198 in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. St. Albans: Paladin. Baudrillard, Jean. 2010. The Agony of Power. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). BBC. 2015. “A Nation Divided: The Charlie Hebdo Aftermath.” BBC Three, 30 March. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05psc6r. Bergson, Henri. [1900] 1935. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. London: Macmillan. Freud, Sigmund. 1916. Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. A. A. Brill. London: Fisher Unwin.

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Frum, David. 2015. “Why Garry Trudeau Is Wrong about Charlie Hebdo.” Atlantic, 13 April. http://www.theatlantic.com/ politics/archive/2015/04/why-garry-trudeau-is-wrong-about -charlie-hebdo/390336/. Handelman, Don. 1990. Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Handelman, Don, and Bruce Kapferer. 1972. “Forms of Joking Activity: A Comparative Approach.” American Anthropologist 74, no. 3: 484–517. Hubert, Henri, and Marcel Mauss. 1964. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. Trans. W. D. Halls. London: Cohen & West. Kapferer, Bruce. 1983. A Celebration of Demons: Exorcism and the Aesthetics of Healing in Sri Lanka. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. McHugh, Peter. 1968. Defining the Situation: The Organization of Meaning in Social Interaction. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Rancière, Jacques. 2006. Hatred of Democracy. Trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Verso. Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Spengler, Oswald. 1991. The Decline of the West. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trudeau, Garry. 2015. “The Abuse of Satire.” Atlantic, 11 April. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/04/ the-abuse-of-satire/390312/.