Charlie’s Secret
by Jacques-Alain Miller
Fourth -
Paris, Wednesday, January 14, Text sent at 8 am
In Argentina, the dove’s droppings bring good luck. This is what my friend Graciela, who basks on the beach, tells me “Acá, si a uno lo caga una paloma, significa buena suerte” (Here if a dove shits, it is good luck). Let us accept this omen. We know that the president believes in his lucky stars. In short, we’re in deep shit, it’s a good sign.
Graciela, who has read my courses, wondered if it would not be a “response of the Real,” a manifestation of the Gods. The Romans, so superstitious, would not have failed to believe it. And let’s not forget that Jesus once baptized saw the sky open, “the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove” (Luke 3:22)
A divine poo would serve as the Holy Ampoule last Sunday? Boulevard Voltaire the cathedral of Reims? The president of the Republic would now be the Anointed of the Lord?
The affinities of the Holy Spirit with the anal object are no longer to be discovered. Lacan, without comment, cites the article by Ernest Jones on the fertilization of the Virgin by the ear, which makes the said Holy Spirit analogous to the fart. No blasphemy: the thesis is anatomically founded, since the mouth and the anal canal correspond to the two ends of the gastrointestinal tract. The spiritual breath is the parent of intestinal gas, speech mates with excrement.
We see that psychoanalysis in its green years was not without affinity, and vice versa, with the spirit of the band at Charlie. Scatology is the purest of its inspiration since professor Choron’s Hara-Kiri [a monthly French satirical magazine]. The thread runs through its various avatars, anarchist, green, leftist, neoconservative. “Stupid and Malicious Journal”? “Irresponsible Journal”? These are approximations. What it is, in truth, is this: Charlie has a mission in this world, it is to revoke all sublimation in order to honor the drive.
As such, this little sheet, this little leaf – which is obviously not a fig leaf – has its place in the history of manners. Let’s strap on our seven-league boots and valiantly run through the course of the centuries, in accelerated form, as in a comic book:
The Adventures of the Drive
1. The Greco-Roman world was much closer to the drive than we are, as noted by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud and others. Then came Christian discourse. Peter Brown’s title says it all: Virginité, célibat et continence dans le christianisme primitif (Virginity, celibacy and continence in early Christianity). Christianity reverted to its Greco-Roman sources in the Renaissance. There follows a new alliance between religion and flesh. This is one of the reasons for the Protestant revolt, which, however, on another level, also gives its place to the flesh, not least through the marriage of pastors. Here we should not overlook the taste of Martin Luther for scatology. Would he have said “Je suis Charlie”?
2. Here is the watershed. Protestantism will have austerity, the Catholic Church the sensual pleasure that it decided, at the Council of Trent, to mobilize for the ends of the propagation of the faith. The 17th century saw large population displacements: the “Great Migration” of English Puritans to the American colonies (80,000 persons); the diaspora of the Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (400,000 persons). And 18th century in France? Talleyrand, born in 1754, later said: “Those who have not experienced the old regime will never know what the sweetness of living was.”
3. Napoleon, to be frank, is moral order. The Holy Alliance extends throughout Europe. Next to set the tone is Queen Victoria. Quip: having read Lytton Strachey’s book of that name, Lacan said that she was the condition sine qua non of Freud. The Belle Époque ends with the slaughter of 1914. Then there was the Roaring Twenties, etc. And as for the Liberation, its totem was “Le Tabou” [a Jazz club], on the corner of rue Dauphine and rue Christine. Then there were [France’s] last colonial wars. In 1960, Hara-Kiri appears featuring Pee, poo, cock, and willy. Phew! We pause for breath. We breath miasma, but the smell is as invigorating as that of the cheeses of Jerome K. Jerome. One snickers at Grand Charles and Aunt Yvonne (a popular nickname of Mrs. De Gaulle).
4. Understand, you who are going (or not going) to the Sade exhibition at Musée d’Orsay, and who read (or don’t read) in the Pléiade edition that at the time, a bookseller in Saint-Germain-des-Près had you pass into his back room in order to thumb the little blue volumes of Justine and Juliette, printed by Pauvert on cheap paper. We did not risk much, but in the end we enjoyed the thrill of the forbidden with little cost. At the same time, left-wing newspapers were redacted when they spoke of torture in Algeria; they appeared with large blanks. Censorship was so familiar it was personified: It was called “Anastasia” since the 1870s. It was a kind of feminine bogeyman, armed with large scissors (castration!). The last straw was reached on the day that, on the authority of Mme. De Gaulle, mobilized, it is said, by the nuns of the Union of Major Superiors, the Minister of Culture banned Jacqes Rivette’s film of Diderot’s [novel], The Nun.
5. It was in 1966, the year when Lacan’s Écrits came out. In that time, you see, to speak and to write mattered, it was reacting (réagir), as in the earliest times. If you took on the army, the Church, even via Diderot, who had his statue in Paris and his Pleiade edition at Gallimard, it responded. The moral Other had not yet been made unavailable. Peepee caca poopoo kept a power of transgression. As long the big Other of the De Gaulle and Pompidou years declared itself present, it was the heyday of Professor Choron. But after this, the Other was removed and dismantled piece by piece. The steps of the process are outlined in the recent account by Éric Zemmour, its sometimes outrageous character does not erase its documentary interest. In truth, the big Other was never anything more than a puppet operated by a great puppeteer. The General knew it, and said so. Moreover, one of his favorite sayings was, according to his confidant, Alain Peyrefitte, “J’ai toujours fait comme si. Ça finit souvent par arriver,” “I’ve always done as if. It often ends up happening, ” (C’était De Gaulle, p. 171).
6. Charlie Hebdo, which had taken over from Hara-Kiri, snuffed out on the General’s coffin, died in turn, but a natural death, in 1981 [when its publication apparently stopped forever], when the left came to power with Mitterrand. For a long time, the old, neo-Gaullist big Other progressively disabled, like Hal in the Kubrick film 2001, responded to provocations with no more than a “Bof!” accompanied by the shrug the English-speaking world isolated as the “Gallic (or French) shrug,” as it seemed characteristic of our way of being. It’s difficult to transgress when there are no longer any limits. So it would have to switch to insults, defamation, racism and incitement to murder. Who killed Charlie? In a single word, it was permissivité. The word is not in Littre; it is attested in the language since 1967; it translated the English “permissiveness” in 1947 (Le Robert. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française).
7. Of the Charlie whose editorial staff has just been wiped out, I will say little. The publication was reborn after a break of eleven years, in 1992. The presence of prominent former members and the allegiance maintained to the drive in the canonical form of peepee caca poopoo [pip caca cucu] showed that the resurrection of the title was not a sham. Its deeds: in 2006 it republished the Danish cartoons of Mohammed; in 2011 it produced an issue spoofing sharia. The evening of the release, fire on the premises; the managing editor, Charb and two other designers were placed under police protection. Islamic threats multiplied. In 2013, the online magazine Inspire, published by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, shall include the name of Charb on its list of persons wanted for “crimes against Islam” (Wikipedia). Last week, on January 7, the massacre.
Three theses, one paradox
Nothing in the first 21 years of the magazine could predict that the majority of its editorial staff would fall in a hail of bullets fired by Islamic warriors. But also, why relentlessly mock the values of Islam, when the risk was so patent and the danger not to be doubted?
There is the noble thesis: they were fighters for freedom of expression. Charb, who was a Communist, said in a formula often quoted, and which will go down in history: “Ça fait sûrement un peu pompeux, mais je préfère mourir debout que vivre à genoux.“ (It certainly may seem a little pompous, but I’d rather die standing than live on my knees.) There is the ignoble thesis, that Tariq Ramadan peddled on the evening of the killing in an English dialogue with Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus: it was to make money. There is finally so to speak, the clinical thesis outlined by Delfeil de Ton yesterday in L’Obs.
Former member of Charlie and friend of Charb, DDT, highlights the stubbornness of Charb and his responsibility in a troubling text: “He was the boss. What need had he to lead his team in the escalation?” He recalls Wolinski’s words after the fire on the premises: “I think we are unconscious and fools who took an unnecessary risk.” He concludes: “Charb who preferred to die and Wolin who preferred to live.” We say after reading it: Charb the suicidal? Charb the melancholic? He presented himself in fact like a man with nothing, with nothing to lose: “I have no kids, no woman, no car, no credit.” Was the weekly jubilation of the motley crew, to put it in the manner of Melanie Klein and Winnicott, a manic defense against depression? Behind the phallic parade, the death drive, was this Charlie’s secret?
If it’s necessary to choose between these three theories or hypotheses, I rule out the second because, objectively, the financial interest was not commensurate with the risks involved. We must ascribe to Charlie the passion of the Miser and nothing supports that. It’s a disgrace to a professor of Oxford University. Thesis 3 deserves consideration, but it pales before the first, because the heroism of the melancholic, like that of a psychotic, a pervert or a neurotic remains heroism.
Let’s be careful here. For there to be what is called heroism, that is to say, a great sacrifice, there needs to be sublimation. Now, I have argued that Charlie was the anti-sublimation, it was dedicated to the worship of the drive, to the exaltation of enjoyment. Contradiction. This is where a sentence of Érik Emptaz, on the first page of Canard enchaîné, sheds some light. While this satirical organ is now subject to the same threats as Charlie, it promises to continue with its comrades to “laugh at everything” except “the freedom to do so.” This is the point, in fact, and it splits.
1) If I want to laugh at everything, it’s impossible to make fun of the freedom to laugh at everything. So the laughter stops there. We do not laugh at the freedom to laugh at everything, we take it seriously. In other words, he who wants to laugh at everything does not laugh at everything. 2) Mocking everything, including my freedom to do so, has the same result. I sacrifice my freedom to laugh in order to have it both ways. In short, to be able to laugh at everything, I must abstain from laughing at everything. Position 2 is cynical. Position 1, I call heroic.
Perhaps certain members of Charlie believed themselves cynical. Maybe they were more or less. But the fact is that they were heroic; Charb knew it, and we noted it afterwards. The error of Delfeil de Ton, I think is to paint us a Charb inhabited by a “Long live death!”
Still, this points to another formula, which makes him a “soldier of Year II” proper and not a cardboard cutout: “Freedom or death.”
It’s the clausule “. . . or death” that is decisive in this case. One who does not put his life in the balance of destiny, who does not engage his being, but only his talent, who only fools around, is not serious. The primacy of life is now so entrenched in Western societies that at the moment of the Sivens dam affair that took the life of Rémi Fraisse, we could hear a local leader of the Socialist Party proffer this enormity: “To die for ideas is one thing, but it’s still relatively dumb and stupid.”
Let’s not damn the poor wretch. What we understand is certainly not what he meant – that Rémi had come to defend an idea, he had not intended to risk his life, but it had been taken from him by an unfortunate sequence of events etc. But this, being a kind of slip, is all the more true. There have been twenty years already since Lipovesky published Le Crépuscule du devoir. There’s nothing surprising in the fact that we didn’t hesitate to deny the martyrs of Charlie the status of heros, by making them, at least by implication, imprudent, not to say crackpots. Correlatively, we trample their killers.
These three men, the terrorists, killing them is not enough for us. They must also have been crazy, sick, and above all barbarians. One calls barbarians those that are denied belonging to a civilization worth the name. First, let’s recognize that our warriors fall under a discourse other than ours, no less structured, no less “civilized,” but otherwise civilized. And in that other discourse, there are also heros.
For the ancient Greeks, barbarian was the one whose language was unintelligible to them, hence the word, formed by reduplication: bar bar, as our blah blah. Barbarian is one who does not speak, but made noises from the mouth. And, indeed, when one of the Kouachi brothers, at the end of the massacre, and before getting into the car, launches into the street, three times, deliberately, in a loud, intelligible voice, the cry “We have avenged the prophet Muhammad!” We understand nothing except that Islam has nothing to do with it, and that they are bloodthirsty, deranged brutes.
Why not say, for that matter, “animals with two feet,” as the Romans said of the Huns?
Nota Bene
- Peter Brown’s book was published in 1988; it appeared in French at Gallimard in 1995.
- On the barbarians, Cf. Bruno Dumézil, Les Barbares expliqués à mon fils, Seuil, 2010.
- Finally, I intend to return to the article published yesterday in Le Monde, p. 9 by professor Alain Renaut, who gives body, although still in very general terms, to what I called the path of compromise, in the form of a so-called “multiculturalism tempered by concern for interculturalism.”
Translated by Tim Pierson
