Like other institutions in the art world, art schools and, first and foremost, the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, foundations supporting contemporary art such as the Cartier Foundation, Lafayette Anticipations or the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation or even national museums such as the Centre Georges Pompidou or the Musée d'Orsay, the Académie de France in Rome has, for several years, increasingly opened itself up to "contemporary questions" that are supposed to also inform artistic practices. This thus contributes, in fact, to a movement of institutionalization and normalization of schools of thought that claim to be avant-garde and emancipatory and that generally proceed from an obsessive critique of phenomena of "domination" and "systems of standards" as well as support for the cause of their victims - and it matters little that the latter are sometimes more imaginary than real.

Thus sacrificing to the spirit of the times - or, according to some, to an ideology that has become dominant and to which it would be appropriate to conform - the Académie de France in Rome now seems to often give the advantage, in its selection process, to projects that authorize themselves by questioning gender norms (and in particular "hetero-patriarchy"), by criticizing racism (designated as "systemic" or inherent in all institutions of Western societies, while anti-Semitism remains, in these approaches, and unsurprisingly, as a blind spot) or even by criticizing, against the backdrop of a global ecological crisis invested with an apocalyptic dimension, "extractive" and "neo-liberal" capitalism.

It is also worth remembering that "decolonial" criticism had made a great noise for itself in this institution in 2020, when residents had requested that eight tapestries forming a wall hanging, made in 1687 by the Gobelins factory and depicting "the West Indies" (ie Brazil) because they were supposed, by their very motives, to bear witness to representations produced by a now intolerable “colonial imagination”.

Except when it has been a question, at least for the moment (because nothing will escape these new deconstruction enterprises until the moment when, perhaps, a "deconstruction within deconstruction" is introduced), of art historians, musicians or restorers of works of art, from whom a certain technical mastery is required above all, the taking into account of such criteria, in the examination of the artistic careers already accomplished and the projects presented by the different candidates, seems to have resulted, in this concern for openness, in the selection, ever more marked, of projects by artists coming either from the "global South" or from "post-colonial immigration" or claiming to belong to sexual minorities ("transgender", "non-binary" "queer »).

The following were selected as boarders in 2023-2024, as examples:

– Senegalese artist Hamedine Kane, whose “work focuses on exile, wandering, heritage and the awareness that arises from the post-independence political experiences of certain African countries, questions their recent history, particularly that of Senegal, and reports on its upheavals and aspirations around the notions of Afro-nostalgia and Afro-utopia” and who was also specified as “also interested in the influence of African, African-American and Afro-diasporic literature on political, social and environmental commitments”; he carried out in Rome "a research project around three great black American writers exiled in Paris in the second half of the 1940s: Richard Wright, Chester Himes and James Baldwin", which aimed to promote "the stories of the so-called "protest" novel specific to the three writers, attentive to the experience of violence lived and suffered and to the refusal of designation which are expressed in their works";

– the French-Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga, whose “performance project dealing with the theme of toxicity and taking as its anchor the history of Rome, Italy and beyond” was stated in the following terms: “toxic or contaminated lands can be cured, just as our toxic habits can be changed to be healthier. Some poisons have antidotes: here, a double force is exerted. One that exposes the structures and the reasons why we poison ourselves; but also the gestures and forms that allow us to take back and perhaps remedy our toxic world”; this project aimed, under the imperative of designing artistic gestures emblematic of “exit strategies” (…), “to envisage the future differently” by having, in this case, the “desire to lay bare the environmental toxicity that characterizes our current reality but also other forms of social and structural toxicity”.

Along the same lines, and again as examples, the following were selected as boarders in 2022-2023:

– The French dancer and choreographer “ queer » Lasseindra Ninja, whose "work is based on pan-African and transatlantic vectors within a contemporary reflection on the history of bodies, the traces and reminiscences of collective dance experiences" and whose project is inspired "by culture Ballroom » had as its object « the notion of fair play in that it questions and critiques the faculty of judging inside and outside the community paradigm, a palimpsest of transformative and performative critical experience”;

– Senegalese visual artist Bocar Niang, “born a griot from a family of griots,” whose project in Rome was “two-part: on the one hand, the production of stories and oral/sound performances aimed at developing the stories of objects, works and strengthening the links between individuals, mobilities, and their contexts and territories" by means of "multilingual readings", "podcasts", "declamations of writings and the creation of sound works on the collections, landscapes or legends of the Villa Medici and the city of Rome"; and, "on the other hand, the creation of a series of sculptures entitled Baby foot, composed of 44 drawings and models of individuals, whose characters come from different countries around the world.

The selection of residents for 2024-2025 did not deviate, quite the contrary, from a policy that largely meets the criteria mentioned above; the press release announcing it thus indicates that the Academy has selected two non-binary candidates this year compared to only one the previous year — this is undoubtedly, but subject to confirmation by those concerned, the French visual artist Clovis (born Chloé) Maillet, author of an essay entitled Fluid genders: from Joan of Arc to trans saints (Paris, 2020) and whose project, relating to the visual arts, invites us to think "from a specific mourning (the death of a mother crushed by antifeminism (...)) a historical condition (that of women and gender minorities who think about violence and live with the dead)", and of the French director Jérôme Clément-Wilz whose film script project questions, based on the figure of Saint Paul, what "a Christianity queer, worked by gender fluidity and the desire for emancipation”.

And why not, after all, would one like to be able to write, subject to the quality of the artistic projects to be carried out and their effective realization, not to open up to a diversity of "artistic proposals" reflecting a diversity of experiences of the world or worlds - or even "back-worlds"? The attempts at theoretical justification of the projects in question unfortunately tend to tint with skepticism the benevolence with which one would like to be able to consider them. And any benevolence should however find a limit with the selection, for this year 2024-2025, and under the title of literature, of Louisa Yousfi.

We hesitate at first, after having read the very small and only book that Louisa Yousfi has published, Stay barbaric (Paris, 2022), to designate her as a “writer” although she has given to read, since then and in a collective work (Against political literature, Paris, 2024) a short poem inspired by The Iliad where ancient heroes who have found "a beautiful death" are used to ennoble the young people from the neighborhoods who are victims of a "police that kills"; we hesitate even more to describe her as a "French" (writer) so much has she contrived, by looking towards Algeria where her parents have their origins and regretting having to write in a language, French, which would not be her own - although she does not know, by her own admission, Arabic in any of its variants - to reject this national belonging by a desire to "remain barbaric" (or more precisely therefore, in her particular case, to become one again) which, however, keeps us far removed from Arthur Rimbaud when he wrote "Mauvais sang". 

Le European vocabulary of philosophies (Paris, 2004), under the entry “Translate”, reminds us that in ancient Greek, “ Barbarizein, (…) onomatopoeia of the same ilk as our “blabater” (…), designates a conjunction of linguistic, anthropological and political traits which make the “barbarian” a heteros, a completely different oneself, unintelligible and whose very humanity can be questioned", a definition that our author, if she were truly interested in the ancient world, could willingly make her own since it agrees with her descriptions and analyses of the contemporary world. But could she also subscribe to what we read thereafter: it matters little whether one is "barbarian" by nature or by culture, "(...) the question is ultimately political: barbarians are those who support, or even call for, despotism" - which, let us remember, dominates in many states of the "global South"?

The project presented by the author, mentioned in the last text of Stay barbaric, would like to be "devoted to writing a work of fiction based on a Franco-Algerian family affected by the death of the father, a story that the author will work to bring into contact with other writing traditions than the testimonial form or the archival document and in a language driven by a radical syncretism. It will notably deal with lost tales, secret heritage, spiritual biology, intergenerational telepathy between a people of indigenous ghosts and their descendants engaged in a series of "Herculean labors" to be carried out in an increasingly hostile world." However, reading Stay barbaric, which she used to present her candidacy to the Académie de France in Rome, casts some doubt on the real possibility for the author to accomplish the overly ambitious project of evidence that she submitted to the jury for deliberation. It is in fact only a poor, confused and unworthy pamphlet, whose purpose, as evidenced by the text that introduces it in a programmatic manner ("A species of barbarism"), is to expose what we could designate as "a decolonial literary policy" deduced from the rhetoric of the indigenous, racialist and separatist movement to which the author refers. And he does not fail to recall, moreover, that "the decolonials, these self-proclaimed barbarians, want to rebuild the race, but in their favor this time" and that the universe of these, when they make themselves heard, for example, by the voice of the rappers of PNL (to the gloss of whose "work" one of the texts of the book is devoted, "Niqués pour la vie"), is only comprehensible "by belonging to the group, belonging to the blood ».

By strategy, Stay barbaric intends to subvert the enemy's language — i.e. the white French colonizer, representing a supposedly continued "empire" with "civilizational pretensions" - and this in two stages: this language must first be appropriated before being debased to be turned against the said enemy; by getting rid of it, it is also a question of getting rid of "legitimate culture", apprehended as an instrument of "domination" or "acculturation" of the supposed "barbarian" (or "racialized") who nevertheless strives, and in a gesture of "resistance", to always remain "unassimilable". The "barbarism" in question, a state to be preserved or rediscovered, thus designates this "unappropriable" and "wasteland" place from where the "barbarian" can reject any belonging to the Republic, to the Nation that it produces, to the language and culture that are his own, described as the instruments of an alienating violence - and imposed by the "white bourgeoisie".

However, in this case, Stay barbaric, inspired by a truly delusional ideology, fails to interest even a little bit. The work is so poor and so confused on the theoretical level that one cannot avoid wondering whether the author subscribes to what she writes and whether she has read and read well the "revolutionary" authors that she cites or to whom she alludes more discreetly. Moreover, the "language of the enemy" is, simply because of the author's lack of talent, not sufficiently appropriate to be sufficiently debased, in accordance with the subversive design that it gives itself; and this is precisely what ends up disqualifying a text that is, in truth, neither done nor to be done.

Louisa Yousfi is a member of the Parti des Indigènes de la République (PIR), to whose founders she says she owes "everything", and claims, as a "political and ethical gesture", to offer to the "voiceless" or "nameless" of "post-colonial immigration" a large epic form that she opposes to a small form that would be the sociologically inspired novel commissioned from the "racialized", for the purpose of "elucidation" and "normalization", by the "white bourgeoisie". In fact, she proves incapable of exposing, as did the often-cited Kateb Yacine, or, in another register, Jean Genet, a true "politics of prose" by which she would have the possibility of forcefully subverting the language of this "supposedly civilized" enemy that she believes she must designate in order to indict him. It is true that taking as a source of inspiration the "works" of rappers, archetypes, according to the author, of "barbarians", does not help him to live up to his ambition.

When it comes to epics or language work, is it not rather from a Pierre Guyotat – a writer whom, like other potential allies, she ignores – that she should have drawn inspiration to try to become or “remain barbarian” again? Indeed, we find in this work a double contestation, both of the social order and of the linguistic order, which, having its origins in the Algerian War, led in him to the invention of a new language and an epic form that was worthy of him and capable of ensuring its infinite deployment. Louisa Yousfi could clearly have given herself such a project, strong in her desire to circumscribe and invest through writing the place of the “barbarism” that she claims; but, misled by a delusional and confusedly appropriate ideology, having probably read little, having really only been the subject of a historical impoverishment of experience but adoring, unsurprisingly, the noise and obscenity of rappers, it continues to move away from what, in fact, has already been accomplished by an important writer. For in Stay barbaric In the end, we cannot even distinctly note either an accident of thought or an accident of language: at most, to paraphrase Julien Gracq, an accident of the sewer system, and assumed as such since the author claims herself to be in a way of overflowing or vomiting: everything is broken down and confusedly mixed up, to the point that, consternation winning out, the book ends up falling out of hands.

And since she is an "Indigenous of the Republic," we are hardly surprised, in substance, to read in the third of the texts that make up the work ("The Impossible Communion of Tears") a strange appreciation of the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the form of a perverse apology. We are no more surprised, consequently, when we discover what the author writes about the supposed "genocide" that is currently being committed by the Israeli army in Gaza and "which we must talk about," she affirms in a text first published on the site qgdecolonial.fr and taken back to his account Instagram on June 12, "as from the moment when the factory of white innocence seized up, when all its arguments of authority, all its rhetorical scams preached in the desert." 

If we were not, and have been for a long time, accustomed to a certain hypocrisy or a certain cynicism, we might be surprised that this young author did not have the slightest moral embarrassment in requesting from the French Republic a scholarship to stay at the Académie de France in Rome to write there, in very comfortable material conditions, a work with partly autobiographical material, while she never ceases to accuse - and we must read in what terms - this Republic and its State, necessarily promoters of a "systemic" "racism" and "Islamophobia". She plays on it quite consciously, as indicated by what she herself writes in the last of the texts that make up Stay barbaric ("The Way of Blame"): "Today in progressive circles, writing ʺas a non-white womanʺ is a sesame. The door opens before you even have to knock. We are welcome, we even have the impression that we were expected. It is never a good sign. Every time we have been treated so well, it was to enlist us. We, the unmanageable, the revealable, the good students, have the means to negotiate our entry" - remarks which, in light of her candidacy, provide a fine example of false bad conscience.

She would probably justify herself by invoking a necessary personal sacrifice to contribute to the dissemination of the decolonial ideology, which she publicly congratulated herself on increasingly gaining ground in academic and cultural institutions. Moreover, she herself offers a pleasant and polite, almost candid version of it, which surely facilitated the jury's decision in a context which, as we have seen, made it possible if not probable. But would we not be right to be surprised that the jury charged with examining Louisa Yousfi's candidacy did not itself have any moral embarrassment - a jury which we do not know whether we should admit, following the future resident, that it is representative of this Western "progressivism" which she readily accuses of ulterior motives without this affecting her own desire to be recognized for it?

By contrast, can we imagine an Omar Blondin-Diop, a brilliant philosophy student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud who became a Maoist activist and, as such, an actor for Jean-Luc Godard (in Chinese et Weekend), to be a candidate at the Académie de France in Rome and the jury to select him - assuming that this would have been possible at the time in light of the regulations in force? It is simply unimaginable: this authentic Senegalese revolutionary had preferred to continue in sub-Saharan Africa the struggle he had begun in France, before being arrested, imprisoned and probably assassinated in 1973 in a jail on the island of Gorée. Different times, different customs...

Faced with such a selection, which indicates a renunciation, very much in keeping with the spirit of the times, of the criterion of excellence, it would be legitimate to demand that this more than complacent jury - and in particular two of its members, Sam Stourdzé who chaired it in his capacity as director of the Academy, and Tiphaine Samoyault, director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, former resident, qualified personality designated for literature - provide explanations for its choice: explanations that cannot be refused on the grounds of the secrecy of a collective and sovereign deliberation, so overwhelming does its responsibility seem in this scandalous choice, for which one cannot find any motivations other than ideological - apart from the fact that it undoubtedly reveals some personal connivance.

To conclude, we will recall that François Maspero, a great publisher, a "revolutionary" who later became only a "progressive", published in 1979, in French translation, a work by the great Italian historian - and Jew, forced into exile in 1938 because of the racial laws of the Mussolini government - Arnaldo Momigliano, entitled Barbarian Wisdom ; we cannot advise Louisa Yousfi enough to take advantage of her stay in Rome to read it, because it would perhaps make her understand what, by drawing on great and true knowledge, one can think and write about an empire, the barbarians it conquered on its margins and the complex relationships that linked and transformed them in the thickness of historical time.

But unfortunately, it is very likely that she will do nothing about this advice.