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Jean Baudrillard |
Two situations, both critical and insoluble.
One is the total worthlessness of contemporary
art. The other is the impotence of the political
class in front of Le Pen. The two situations
are exchangeable, and their solutions are
transferable. Indeed, the inability to offer
any political alternative to Le Pen is displaced
to the cultural terrain, to the domain where
a Holy Cultural Alliance prevails. Conversely,
the problematization of contemporary art
can only come from a reactionary, irrational,
or even fascist mode of thinking.
What can we oppose to such a dignified conjuration
of imbeciles? Nothing. There is unfortunately
nothing which can remedy such a mechanism
of intellectual perversion. This mechanism
is based upon the bad conscience and the
total impotence of the so-called "democratic"
elites who are unable to find a solution
to both impasses, that of contemporary art
and that of the political struggle against
the Front National. The elites have simply
chosen to fuse the two problems together
in a single moralizing and vituperative discourse.
The real question, then, becomes whether
one can still open one's mouth, utter anything
which may sound strange, irreverent, heterodoxical
or paradoxical without being automatically
called a fascist (which is, let's admit it,
a way of paying tribute to fascism). Why
has every moral, conventional, or conformist
discourse - traditional rightist discourses
- moved to the left?
There has been a shattering reformulation.
The right used to embody moral values and
the left, by contrast, used to represent
an antagonistic mode of historical and political
exigency. But today the left is deprived
of its political energy. It has become a
purely moralistic law-making structure, a
representative of universal values, a sacred
holder of the reign of Virtue, and an incarnation
of antiquated values such as Good or Truth.
It now acts as a jurisdiction which asks
everyone to act responsibly while still granting
itself the right to remain irresponsible.
The political illusion of the left (which
had remained frozen during twenty years of
opposition) turned into a platform of historical
morality (and not of historical direction)
once it came to power. It then became the
holder of a morality of truthfulness, basic
rights, and good conscience, having thus
reached a zero degree on the political scale
and, undoubtedly, the lowest point of the
genealogy of morals. Its moralization of
all values marked its historical failure (and the failure of thinking in general).
Since then, even reality, the principle of
reality, has become an act of faith. Try
to question the reality of war, for example,
and you immediately become a betrayer of
moral law.
With the left and the traditional right both
deprived of political substance, where has
the political gone to? Well, simply, it has
moved to the far right. As Bruno Latour so
accurately noted the other day in Le Monde,
the only political discourse today in France
is that of Le Pen's Front National. All the
rest is moral and pedagogic discourse, teachers'
lessons and lecturers' tirades, managers'
rhetoric and programmers' jargon. By contrast,
having given himself to evil and immorality,
Le Pen has been able to take over all of
the political, the remnant of what has been
abandoned or voluntarily rejected by a political
ideology of Good deeds and Enlightenment
values. The more he is antagonized by a moral
coalition (a sign of political impotence),
the more he enjoys the benefits of political
immorality, the benefits which come with
being the only one on the side of evil. In
the past, whenever the traditional right
decided to implement an ideology of morality
and order, you could always count on the
left, always attempting to antagonize those
so-called moral values in the name of political
claims. But today, the left is experiencing
the same condition that once characterized
the traditional right. Suddenly responsible
for the defense of moral order, the left
has no choice but to witness the slippage
of abandoned political energies toward political
forces which do not hesitate to antagonize
its newly created order. Conversely, the
left keeps on reactivating the source of
evil by continuing to embody the rule of
virtue, which of course is nothing more than
the rule of supreme hypocrisy.
If Le Pen did not exist, we would have to
invent him! Indeed, it is thanks to him that
we can get rid of our evil share, of what
is the worst part of us. It is as such that
we can curse Le Pen. If he were to disappear,
however, we would be left begging for pity!
We would be left struggling with our own
racist, sexist, and nationalist (everyone's
fate) viruses. Simply, we would be abandoned
to the murderous negativity of society. As
such, Le Pen is the perfect mirror of the
political class which uses him to conjure
up its own evils, just as every individual
uses the political class to cast away any
form of corruption inherent to society (both
are similar types of corrupt and cathartic
functions). Trying to put an end to this,
trying to purify society and moralize public
life, trying to eradicate what claims to
embody evil is a complete misunderstanding
of the way evil operates, of the way politics
itself operates.
Opting for a mode of unilateral denunciation,
and ignoring the very principle of reversibility
of evil, anti-Le Pen supporters have left
him with a monopolistic control over the
evil share. Having thus been cast away, Le
Pen can no longer be dislodged. By demonizing
him in the name of virtue, the political
class simply offers him a most comfortable
situation. Le Pen simply has to pick up and
recycle the discourse of ambivalence, of
denial of evil, and of hypocrisy that his
opponents constantly throw at him in the
course of their battle for the defense of
law or the defense of a good cause. Le Pen's
enemies provide him with the energy he needs.
Too eager to discredit him, they simply transform
his mistakes into (his own) victories. They
do not see that good never comes from a purification
of evil (evil always retaliates in a forceful
way), but rather from a subtle treatment
which turns evil against itself.
All this shows us that Le Pen may be the
embodiment of worthlessness and idiocy. No
doubt! But he is above all the symptom of
his opponents' stupidity. The imbeciles are
those who, by denouncing him, blatantly reveal
their own impotence and idiocy and glaringly
demonstrate how absurd it is to antagonize
him face to face. They simply have not understood
the rules of evil that his game of musical
chairs follow. By continuing to antagonize
him, the imbeciles give life to their own
ghosts, their negative doubles. This shows,
indeed, a terrifying lack of lucidity on
their part. But what drives such a perverse
effect, the fact that the left remains trapped
in a discourse of denunciation whereas Le
Pen maintains a privilege of enunciation?
What pushes one to gain all the profits from
the crime while the other suffers the negative
effects of recrimination? What causes one
to "get off" [s'eclatant] with
evil when the other gets lost with the victim?
Well, it's quite simple. By incarcerating
Le Pen in a ghetto, it is in fact the democratic
left which becomes incarcerated and which
affirms itself as a discriminatory power.
It becomes exiled within its own obsession
and automatically grants a privilege of justice
to what it demonizes. And, of course, Le
Pen never misses an opportunity to claim
republican legality and fairness on his behalf.
But it is above all on the imaginary but
very pregnant figure of the rebel and persecuted
soul that he establishes his prestige. Thus,
he can enjoy the consequences of both legality
and illegality. A victim of ostracism, Le
Pen has an incredible freedom of language
and can deploy an unmatched arrogance of
judgement, something that the left has deprived
itself of.
Let's give an example of such a magical thought
that today stands in for political thought.
Le Pen is blamed for the sentiment of rejection
and exclusion of immigrants in France. But
this is just a drop in an ocean of social
exclusion that has overwhelmed all of society
(recently, exclusion itself, as well as the
"social breakdown" that politicians
like to mention, were all excluded by the
decree signed by the President of the Republic
to dissolve the National Assembly). We are
all both responsible and victim at the same
time of this inextricable and complex process
of exclusion. There is something typically
magical in the need to conjure up this virus,
which is everywhere to be found (it is a direct function of our social and
technical "progress"), and in the
desire to exorcise the curse of exclusion
(and our impotence by the same token) through
the figure of a hated man, institution, or
organization, no matter who or what they
are. It is as if we were faced with a tumor
in need of extraction whereas, in fact, the
metastases have already expanded everywhere.
The Front National simply follows the course
of the social metastases, and is all the
more virulent since people think that they
have eradicated the disease when, in fact,
it has already infected the entire body.
Not to mention that this process of magical
projection of the Front National takes place
along the same lines as this party's own
process of demonization of immigrants. One
must always be suspicious of the ruse of
contamination, a ruse which, by means of
the transparency of evil, mutates positivity
into negativity, and a demand for liberty
into "democratic despotism." As
usual, it is a question of reversibility,
of a subtle encirclement of evil whose rational
intelligence is never suspected. While modern
pathology tells us a lot about the physical
body, we do not pay attention to this mode
of analysis when it comes to the social body.
To remain within the political, we must step
away from ideology and look at things through
the lens of social physics. Our democratic
society is a stasis. Le Pen is a metastasis.
Global society is dying of inertia and immune
deficiency. Le Pen is simply the visible
transcription of such a viral condition;
he is the spectacular projection of the virus.
This happens in dreams too. Le Pen is a burlesque,
hallucinatory figuration of a latent state,
of a silent inertia caused by forced integration
and systematic exclusion. Since the hope
of finally curing social inequalities has
truly disappeared (by and large), it is no
surprise if resentment has moved to the level
of racial inequality. The failure of the
social explains the success of the racial
(and of all the other fatal strategies).
As such, Le Pen is the only savage analyst
in today's society. The fact that he is placed
on the far right is merely the sad result
of the fact that analysts are no longer to
be found on the left or the far left. Judges,
intellectuals no longer analyze. Only the
immigrants perhaps, as polar opposites, could
become analysts too. But they already have
been recycled by a good and responsible humanitarian
thought. Le Pen is the only one who operates
a radical erasure of the so-called distinction
between right and left. This is, no doubt,
an erasure by default. But the harsh criticism
of this conventional distinction which was
unleashed in the 1960s (and culminated in
1968) has unfortunately disappeared from
the political scene today. Le Pen simply
recuperates a de facto situation that the
political class refuses to confront (it even
uses elections to deny it), but whose extreme
consequences will be felt some day. If, one
day, political imagination, political will,
and political demand hope to rebound, they
will have to take into account the radical
abolition of the antiquated and artificial
distinction between right and left, which,
in fact, has been largely damaged and compromised
over the past decades, and which only holds
today through some sort of complicit corruption
on both sides. This distinction is dead in
practice but, by means of an incurable revisionism,
is constantly reaffirmed. Thus, Le Pen is
the only one who makes up the new political
scene, as if everyone else had already agreed
to destroy what's left of democracy, perhaps
to produce the retrospective illusion that
it actually used to mean something.
What consequences of this extreme (but original)
situation can we envisage if we do not focus
on the hallucinatory medium that Le Pen embodies,
if we do not take into account the point
of magical conjuration where all energies
converge and vanish? How can we avoid falling
for the viral growth of our own ghosts if
we fail to take into account, beyond moral
order and democratic revisionism, the type
of savage analysis that Le Pen and the Front
National have, to some extent, taken from
us?
This article originally appeared as "La conjuration des imbeciles" in Liberation on May 7, 1997. Translated by Francois Debrix. Francois Debrix is a Ph. D. candidate in Political Theory and International Relations at Purdue University. |