The evenT of Charlie hebdo Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis General Editor: Bruce Kapferer Volume 1 Volume 9 THE WORLD TRADE CENTER IDENTIFYING WITH FREEDOM AND GLOBAL CRISIS Indonesia after Suharto Critical Perspectives Edited by Tony Day Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 10 Volume 2 THE GLOBAL IDEA OF ‘THE GLOBALIZATION COMMONS’ Critical Issues Edited by Donald M. Nonini Edited by Allen Chun Volume 11 Volume 3 SECuRITY AND DEVELOPMENT CORPORATE SCANDAL Edited by John-Andrew McNeish Global Corporatism against Society and Jon Harald Sande Lie Edited by John Gledhill Volume 12 Volume 4 MIGRATION, DEVELOPMENT, AND EXPERT KNOWLEDGE TRANSNATIONALIZATION First World Peoples, Consultancy, A Critical Stance and Anthropology Edited by Nina Glick Schiller and Edited by Barry Morris and Thomas Faist Rohan Bastin Volume 13 Volume 5 WAR, TECHNOLOGY, STATE, SOVEREIGNTY, WAR ANTHROPOLOGY Civil Violence in Emerging Edited by Koen Stroeken Global Realities Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 14 ARAB SPRING Volume 6 uprisings, Powers, Interventions THE RETREAT OF THE SOCIAL Edited by Kjetil Fosshagen The Rise and Rise of Reductionism Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 15 THE EVENT OF CHARLIE HEBDO Volume 7 Imaginaries of Freedom and Control OLIGARCHS AND OLIGOPOLIES Edited by Alessandro Zagato 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 T e he venT of C h harlie ebdo Imaginaries of Freedom and Control k Edited by Alessandro Zagato berghahn N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D www.berghahnbooks.com berghahn N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D 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 978­1­78533­075­9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978­ 1­78533­076­6 (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 Eight­Year­Old 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, All­Too 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 reas- sure 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 2 Bjørn Enge Bertelsen and Alessandro Zagato and the subsequent attacks that took place in the Île-de- France 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 Introduction 3 analyze the effects that they have had in various spheres of social life, including politics, the state, ideology, col- lective 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 argu- ment 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 cur- rent 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 warmon- gering 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 expendi- ture in several of the major spending countries in these regions” (SIPRI 2015). 4 Bjørn Enge Bertelsen and Alessandro Zagato Campaigns of extermination conducted over the last two decades in the name of peace continue as low-inten- sity 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 coun- tries, war seems to be aimed at destroying “any cohesive- ness 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 every- where deprived of any capacity of collective cohesion” (Pozzana and Russo 2005: 208). Governments and their military apparatuses seem, in other words, to be imple- menting violent fragmenting and atomizing processes aimed at the eradication of any collective political capac- ity of a society. Nearly 10 years ago, Claudia Pozzana and Alessandro Russo (2005: 208) observed that Western military inter- ventionism 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 pres- ent 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 analyz- ing 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