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 loud and significant impact on this institution in 2020, when residents requested that eight tapestries forming a wall hanging, made in 1687 by the Gobelins factory and depicting "the West Indies" ( i.e. Brazil), be taken down from the main hall of the Villa Medici because they were supposed, by their very motifs, to bear witness to representations produced by a now intolerable "colonial imagination".

Except when it came to art historians, musicians or art restorers, for whom a certain technical mastery is required above all, the consideration of such criteria in the examination of artistic careers already completed and projects presented by the various candidates seems to have led, in this concern for openness, to the ever more marked selection of projects from artists from either the "Global South" or "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 “ queer” dancer and choreographer 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 danced experiences” and whose project, inspired “by Ballroom culture ,” had as its object “the notion of fair play in that it questions and critiques the ability to judge inside and outside the community paradigm, a palimpsest of the transformative and performative critical experience”;

– The Senegalese visual artist Bocar Niang, “born a griot from a family of griots,” whose project in Rome was structured “in two parts: on the one hand, the production of oral/sound narratives and performances aimed at developing the narratives 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 Babyfoot , composed of 44 drawings and models of individuals, whose characters come from different countries of the world”.

The selection of residents for 2024-2025 did not deviate, quite the contrary, from a policy that largely respects the criteria mentioned previously; The press release announcing this indicates that the Academy has selected two non-binary candidates this year, compared to only one the previous year — these are undoubtedly, but subject to confirmation by the individuals concerned, the French visual artist Clovis (born Chloé) Maillet, author of an essay entitled Les genres fluides : de Jeanne d'Arc aux saintes trans (Paris, 2020) and whose project, falling within the visual arts, invites us to think "from a specific grief (the death of a mother crushed by anti-feminism (...) a historical condition (that of women and gender minorities who think about violence and live with the dead)", and the French director Jérôme Clément-Wilz whose film script project questions, based on the figure of Saint Paul, what "a queer Christianity, shaped by gender fluidity and the desire for emancipation" would be.

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.

At first, after reading the very small and only book published by Louisa Yousfi, Rester barbare (Paris, 2022), one hesitates to designate her as a "writer" although she has since given to read, in a collective work ( Contre la littérature politique , Paris, 2024) a short poem inspired by The Iliad where the ancient heroes who found "a beautiful death" are used to ennoble the young people of the neighborhoods who are victims of a "police that kills"; We hesitate even more to describe her as a "French" (writer) because she has gone to great lengths, looking towards Algeria where her parents originated and regretting having to write in a language, French, which is not 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, in her particular case, to become so again) which, however, keeps us far removed from Arthur Rimbaud when he wrote "Bad Blood".

The European Vocabulary of Philosophies (Paris, 2004), under the entry "Translate," reminds us that in Ancient Greek, " Barbarizein , (...) an onomatopoeia of the same ilk as our 'blabater' (...), designates a conjunction of linguistic, anthropological, and political traits that make the 'barbarian' a heteros , someone entirely other than oneself, unintelligible, and whose very humanity can be called into question," a definition that our author, if she were truly interested in the ancient world, could readily adopt since it aligns with her descriptions and analyses of the contemporary world. But could she also subscribe to what we read thereafter: regardless of whether one is "barbaric" 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 final text of * Rester barbare* (Remaining a Barbarian ), aims to be "dedicated to writing a work of fiction based on a Franco-Algerian family bereaved by the death of the father, a narrative that the author will explore by connecting it to writing traditions other than testimonial or archival documents, and in a language characterized by radical syncretism. It will deal in particular with lost tales, secret heritage, spiritual biology, and intergenerational telepathy between a people of indigenous ghosts and their descendants engaged in a series of 'Herculean labors' to be accomplished in an increasingly hostile world." However, reading * Rester barbare* , which she used as the basis for her application to the French Academy in Rome, casts some doubt on the author's actual ability to complete the seemingly overly ambitious project she submitted to the jury. It is, in fact, nothing more than a meager, confused, and unworthy little book, claiming, as evidenced by its programmatic introduction ("A Kind of Barbarity"), to expound what we might call "a decolonial literary politics" derived from the rhetoric of the indigenist, racialist, and separatist movement to which the author lays claim. And he does not fail to remind us, moreover, that "the decolonials, these self-proclaimed barbarians, want to refound the race, but in their own favor this time," and that their world, when they make themselves heard, for example, through the voices of the rappers PNL (to whose "work" one of the book's texts, "Fucked for Life," is dedicated), is only comprehensible "through belonging to the group, belonging by blood ."

Strategically, Remaining Barbarian intends to subvert the language of the enemy — i.e., the white French colonizer, representing a supposedly continued “empire” with a “civilizing pretension” — in two stages: this language must first be appropriated before being debased and then turned against said enemy; by detaching oneself from it, one also detaches oneself from the “legitimate culture”, apprehended as an instrument of “domination” or “acculturation” of the supposed “barbarian” (or “racialized”) who nevertheless strives, in a gesture of “resistance”, to always remain “unassimilable”. The "barbarity" in question, a state to be preserved or rediscovered, thus designates this "unappropriable" and "wasteland" place from which the "barbarian" can reject any belonging to the Republic, to the Nation 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 instance, *Rester barbare* , inspired by a truly delusional ideology, fails to be of any interest whatsoever. The work is so theoretically impoverished and confused that one cannot help but wonder whether the author subscribes to what she writes and whether she has actually read, and properly read, the "revolutionary" authors she quotes or to whom she more discreetly alludes. Furthermore, the "language of the enemy," simply due to the author's lack of talent, is not sufficiently appropriate to be debased in the way she claims to have subversively intended; and this is precisely what ultimately disqualifies a text that is, in truth, neither finished nor worth writing.

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 linguistic work, shouldn't she have drawn inspiration from Pierre Guyotat—a writer she, like other potential allies, ignores—in trying to become or "remain barbaric" again? Indeed, his work contains a twofold challenge to both the social and linguistic order, which, originating in the Algerian War, led him to invent a new language and an epic form suited to his needs and capable of ensuring its infinite development. Louisa Yousfi could clearly have undertaken such a project, driven by her desire to circumscribe and explore through writing the realm of "barbarity" she claims as her own. But, led astray by a delusional and confusedly appropriated ideology, having probably read little, having truly only been the subject of a historical impoverishment of experience, yet unsurprisingly adoring the noise and obscenity of rappers, she continues to distance herself from what, in fact, has already been accomplished by an important writer. For in * Rester barbare*, one cannot even distinctly discern either an accident of thought or an accident of language: at most, to paraphrase Julien Gracq, an accident of the sewer system, and accepted as such since the author herself claims a kind of overflow or vomiting: everything is decomposed and confusedly mixed together, to the point that, as consternation sets in, the book finally falls from one's hands.

And since she is a "Native of the Republic," it's hardly surprising, in essence, to read in the third text of the book ("The Impossible Communion of Tears") a strange assessment of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the form of a perverse apology. Nor is it surprising, therefore, when one discovers what the author writes about the supposed "genocide" currently being committed by the Israeli army in Gaza, "which we must talk about," she asserts in a text first published on the website qgdecolonial.fr and reposted on her Instagram account on June 12, "as the moment when the factory of white innocence broke down, when all its arguments from authority, all its rhetorical scams, preached in the desert."

If we weren't, and haven't been for a long time, accustomed to a certain hypocrisy or cynicism, we might be surprised that this young author felt no moral qualms whatsoever about requesting a grant from the French Republic to stay at the French Academy in Rome and write, in very comfortable material conditions, a work with partly autobiographical content, while she constantly accuses—and one must read in what terms—this Republic and its State, necessarily promoters of a “systemic” “racism” and “Islamophobia.” She plays on this quite consciously, moreover, as indicated by what she herself writes in the last of the texts that make up *Rester barbare* (“The Path of Blame”): “Today in progressive circles, writing ‘as a non-white woman’ is a magic key. The door opens before you even have to knock.” We are welcomed, we even have the impression that we were expected. That's never a good sign. Every time we have been treated so well, it was to enlist us. We, the unmanageable ones, the ones who can be exposed, the good students, have the means to negotiate our entry" — remarks which, in view of her candidacy, give a fine example of false guilt.

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 one imagine Omar Blondin-Diop, a brilliant philosophy student at the École Normale Supérieure in Saint-Cloud who became a Maoist activist and, as such, an actor in Jean-Luc Godard's films (La Chinoise and Week-End ), being a candidate for the French Academy in Rome and being selected by the jury—assuming that would have been possible at the time, given the regulations in force? It is quite simply unimaginable: this genuine Senegalese revolutionary had preferred to continue the struggle he had begun in France in sub-Saharan Africa, before being arrested, imprisoned, and then probably murdered in 1973 in a cell on Gorée Island. Times have changed…

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.

In conclusion, it is worth recalling that François Maspero, a great publisher, a "revolutionary" who later became merely "progressive," published in 1979, in French translation, a work by the very great Italian historian—and Jew, forced into exile in 1938 because of the racial laws of the Mussolini government—Arnaldo Momigliano, entitled Barbarian Wisdoms ; Louisa Yousfi would be well advised to take advantage of her stay in Rome to read it, as it might help her understand what, based 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 over the course of historical time.

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