[By André Perrin, January 28, 2022 – We are reproducing, with the agreement of Catherine Kintzler, the content of the article originally published on the blog site Mezetulle]

On the denigration of the conference "After deconstruction". The victim reversal

The conference After Deconstruction: Reconstructing Science and Culture (Sorbonne January 7 and 8, 2022)¹ is the subject of a smear campaign that began even before it was held and continues today. André Perrin questions in particular the qualification of "McCarthyism" soft »². It turns out, however, that none of the speakers called for censoring anyone and that, on the other hand, two of them are the targets of such calls. "And if McCarthyism consists of denouncing opponents so that they are chased from their posts, deprived of employment, brought before the courts and silenced, then yes, a certain McCarthyism exists in France." The list, very long and yet incomplete, that André Perrin draws up of these denunciations and obstructions would remain comical if it did not illustrate the increasingly widespread and worrying use of the victim reversal process.³ Those who are precisely its victims are accused of "McCarthyism".

Before the conference: judging and condemning what has not yet happened

On January 7 and 8, 2022, a conference entitled After Deconstruction: Reconstructing Science and CultureThe good press did not wait for him to stand up to judge and condemn him. Libération had published on December 17, 2021 and January 5, 2022 two venomous articles intended to say all the bad things that had to be thought about it. From the height of his magisterium, the journalist Simon Blin set about, without laughing, teaching the renowned academics invited to speak there that for Derrida, deconstruction "does not mean that everything must be demolished." Le Monde was not to be outdone who, after having published on December 28 a platform defending culture " Woke ", published on January 5, two days before the opening of the conference, a text signed by 74 academics explaining "why the conference organized by the Observatory of Decolonialism, on January 7 and 8, constitutes a caricature of its object because it leads to observing in order to see nothing."

You may be wondering how one can know that a conference that has not yet taken place has failed in its objective? How naive! It is as if you demanded that a film critic go see a film before reporting on it in the columns of the Monde : isn't it enough to know its title, its subject, the name of the director and that of the actors? Our academics are much smarter than you imagine. Some of them provided proof of this, about fifteen years ago, by going to ask the director of the collection "L'univers historique" at the Seuil publishing house for a copy of a book by Sylvain Gouguenheim against which they had already signed and published a manifesto⁴.

After the conference: we told you so!

It is therefore not surprising that the other articles published by Le Monde after the colloquium, that of Soazig Le Nevé on January 8, that of François Dubet on January 10 and that of Jacob Rogozinski on January 23 confirmed the prescience of our 74 academics. Let us stick to the platform of François Dubet entitled "The colloquium organized at the Sorbonne against 'wokism' is a form of McCarthyism soft », first on three or four points of detail, then on the essentials. This conference, Dubet tells us, mobilized alongside honorable speakers with whom they mingled, "the networks of the extreme right". Which networks? In what form were they present at the conference? By whom and how were they mobilized? When and how did they manifest themselves? The readers of the Monde will obviously not know, and for good reason! Dubet then accuses Mathieu Bock-Côté of “diatribes bordering on racism”.

If words still had a meaning, we would understand that what is "on the edge of racism" has not crossed that line and is therefore not racist. But what we must see here is that this kind of rhetorical trick allows us to subliminally treat someone as racist without risking being asked to provide proof in court and without exposing ourselves to being convicted of defamation, which is clever if not courageous. Dubet further suggests that if Zemmour had not been mobilized by his electoral campaign, he would have been invited to the conference in his capacity as "historian" (probably to deliver a eulogy to Marshal Pétain in front of an admiring Dominique Schnapper ...). This is the height of the grotesque.

Almost all of the speakers at this conference were renowned academics whose prestige and academic qualifications were on a par with those of Mr. Dubet, a former specialist in educational sciences at the University of Bordeaux. Only one of the twelve round tables was opened, as “witnesses,” to personalities who were not invited as academics, even if they were not completely foreign to the university, namely Mathieu Bock-Côté, who is not only an editorialist, but also a doctor of sociology, a discipline he teaches at the University of Montreal, and Pascal Bruckner, a novelist, essayist, member of the Goncourt Academy, but also a doctor of philosophy. Nothing to do, therefore, with Zemmour, a simple journalist who is an amateur history student. Finally, Dubet writes: “How can we think that it is up to the State to say which schools of thought are acceptable and which are not?” ", thus attributing this proposition to his opponents to justify the accusation of "McCarthyism". There, it is denied by another article of the Monde which correctly reports what was said at the conference on this subject. I quote Soazig Le Nevé: "The sociologist Nathalie Heinich calls for "better scientific control of highly politicized productions". What she is calling for is therefore not control policy scientific productions, but exactly the opposite: a control scientific of politicized productions.

What is “McCarthyism”? soft "?

Now let's get to the main point: the accusation of McCarthyism, or more precisely, "McCarthyism" soft "Let us first note that the addition of soft McCarthyism is based on a rhetorical duplicity similar to that of "bordering on racism": it allows the use of swear words and the launching of implausibly outrageous accusations with complete impunity. The CRS are thus SS soft and an exasperated mother who slaps an unbearable child could be convinced of light nazism : Jean Moulin's misfortune was to have come across Nazis who were a little less and, too or a little less soft than others. What is McCarthyism? During the Cold War in the United States, for two years, parliamentary committees investigated anti-American activities attributed to communists or communist sympathizers, real or supposed. Civil servants were dismissed, artists were worried, sometimes charged, convicted and imprisoned and some, deprived of employment, had to go into exile like Bertolt Brecht, Charlie Chaplin or Orson Welles. What does this have to do with our conference? Not only did no speaker call for a boycott or censorship of anyone, but not a single name of a living French academic was mentioned: the aim was to combat "wokism", that is to say an ideology, not to denounce individuals.

On the other hand, there were among the speakers at the conference two people who were recently victims of what Dubet calls the soft McCarthyism : Jean Szlamowicz and Vincent Tournier.

Professor of linguistics at the University of Burgundy, Jean Szlamowicz was to give a lecture on December 10, 2019, at his own university entitled "Inclusive writing put to the test by grammar." Activists threatened to prevent it with violence and the director of the UFR banned it, telling Szlamowicz that his colleagues did not want him to be able to express himself, which he agreed with.

As for Vincent Tournier, lecturer in political science at the IEP in Grenoble, he opposed, like his colleague Klaus Kinzler, associate professor of German, the use of the concept of Islamophobia, too often used to prohibit any critical approach to Islam. This earned them posters posted at the entrance to Sciences Po where they were treated as Islamophobes and fascists. The student activists were supported by IEP professors, in particular Gilles Bastin, professor of sociology, who wrote a tweet deploring the fact that “freedom of expression” allowed “two non-Muslim white men” to contest the relevance of the concept of Islamophobia. A 55-page report from the General Inspectorate of Education and Research pointed out the responsibility of the far-left activists and recommended sanctions against them. Brought before a disciplinary board, they were all acquitted. On the other hand, Klaus Kinzler had been forbidden by the director of the IEP of Grenoble to speak in the media about what is happening in this establishment. For having broken this ban, he has just been suspended by the said director and will be brought before a disciplinary board.

The victim reversal. Inventory and counter-inventory

Thus François Dubet accuses of McCarthyism those who are precisely its victims, but without giving the slightest example of a McCarthyist-type act of which these victims would have been guilty themselves. If McCarthyism consists of denouncing adversaries so that they are chased from their post, deprived of employment, brought before the courts and reduced to silence, then yes, a certain McCarthyism exists in France and, unlike François Dubet, I am able to give examples of it.

Inventory

• On May 25, 2002, a fine group of intellectuals published in Le Monde a column in which one could read: "Renaud Camus's remarks are criminal opinions which as such have no right to expression."
• In June 2005, a group of West Indians led by Claude Ribbe filed a complaint in an attempt to have the historian Olivier Grenouilleau convicted by the courts.
• On December 8, 2005, some sixty intellectuals, including twenty academics, sent a letter to the director of France Culture to demand that Alain Finkielkraut be removed from his show. Replicas.
• In the spring of 2008, hundreds of academics signed petitions to denounce the medievalist Sylvain Gouguenheim, demand a "thorough investigation" against him and attempt to ruin his academic career.
• On November 26, 2008, it was the sociologist Michel Wieviorka (with whom François Dubet wrote several books) who signed a column in Télérama to demand that Zemmour be banned from the Arte set and prosecuted in court.
• In 2012, 116 academics and writers signed an article by Annie Ernaux to demand – and obtain – that Richard Millet be removed from the Gallimard reading committee.
• In July 2014, 229 intellectuals countersigned a column by Geoffroy de Lagasnerie and Édouard Louis calling for a boycott of the Blois Meetings to protest against the invitation to Marcel Gauchet to give the inaugural lecture there.
• In 2018 the collective Decolonize the arts tried to prevent Ariane Mnouchkine and her Théâtre du Soleil from performing the show Kanata accusing him of “cultural appropriation.”
• In March 2019, a representation of the Suppliants Aeschylus' lecture, which was to take place at the Sorbonne, was violently prevented by activists from CRAN and other associations on the grounds of "blackface".
• On April 23, 2019, a conference by Alain Finkielkraut at Sciences Po was prevented by a supposedly anti-racist militia and could only be held, later, under police protection.
• On October 24, a conference by Sylviane Agacinski at the University of Bordeaux had to be cancelled under threat from activists who accused her of being a “notorious homophobe”.
• A month later, a training course on the prevention of radicalization that was to be held on November 21 and 22 at the University of Paris I was canceled by the president at the request of several academics who accused the trainer, Mohamed Sifaoui, an Algerian journalist sentenced to death by Islamists and living in France under police protection, of being an "Islamophobe."

No more, the cup is full, you will say. No, it is not full, there are still many other examples, but I would not want to tire the reader. The important thing is this: in all these cases, the McCarthyists soft ( hard, depending on the situation) claim to be part of "progressive" thinking, that is to say, of the intellectual movement in which Mr. Dubet is part.

Counter-inventory

Can F. Dubet cite a single petition in which the organizers and speakers of the conference have called for the dismissal of one of these intellectuals who themselves use this method against those they call "reactionaries"? No, he cannot because it has never, absolutely never, happened. Can he give us an example of a conference by one of them prevented by violence?

• Clémentine Autain, whose "scientific" legitimacy is no more assured than that of Éric Zemmour, was able to give lectures at the University of Paris-Tolbiac and that of Poitiers without suffering the fate reserved for Alain Finkielkraut or Sylviane Agacinski.
• Maboula Soumahoro, a lecturer at the University of Tours who famously declared that a white man "cannot be right against a black woman and an Arab woman" has never seen her public interventions disrupted by white men.
• In 2017, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie gathered nearly 2000 signatories to demand that Nathalie Heinich be stripped of the Petrarch Prize that had just been awarded to her: has any of the academics who joined this enterprise been the subject of a similar cabal by their adversaries?
• Alain Badiou, apologist for the Chinese cultural revolution and thurifer of the Khmer Rouge, was able to say coldly that "if it is really a question of founding a new world, then the price to be paid by the old world, whether in number of deaths or quantity of suffering, is a relatively secondary question."⁵ ; he has not been boycotted, ostracized or stigmatized. No "reactionary" intellectual has asked for his exclusion from the media on the grounds that his statements are "criminal opinions which as such have no right to expression". On the contrary, he is always welcomed kindly, even obsequiously, by public service journalists. And he is treated very courteously by the "McCarthyists" soft » by Mr. Dubet: Marcel Gauchet and Pierre Manent have both agreed to debate with him. As for Alain Finkielkraut, he has received him on numerous occasions at Replicas and even published a book of interviews with him before being insultingly rejected in an open letter.

So where is the tolerance? Where is the intolerance? And where is McCarthyism?

Notes

1 – [Ed.] Conference organized by theObservatory of decolonialism and identity ideologies and by Secularism-Republic Committee January 7-8, 2022 at the Sorbonne. You can listen to the entire presentation on the Observatory website… https://decolonialisme.fr/?p=6517

2 – "The conference organized at the Sorbonne against 'wokeism' is a form of McCarthyism soft », column by François Dubet, Le Monde 10th January 2022 https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2022/01/10/francois-dubet-le-colloque-organise-a-la-sorbonne-contre-le-wokisme-releve-d-un-maccarthysme-soft_6108891_3232.html

3 – [Ed. note] A process by which the victim is accused of being guilty and the accuser presents himself as the victim. The typical example is the “rapist’s argument” (the raped victim is accused of provocation, and the guilty party justifies himself as the victim of this provocation). See on this site the example of the accusation of blasphemy: https://www.mezetulle.fr/du-respect-erige-en-principe/

4 – [Ed. note] See André Perrin’s article “The medievalist and the new inquisitors” on the archives site mezetulle.net http://www.mezetulle.net/article-le-medieviste-et-les-nouveaux-inquisiteurs-par-a-perrin-30483836.html , text taken from his book Scenes from intellectual life in France. Intimidation against debate, Paris: Toucan ed., 2016 https://www.mezetulle.fr/parution-livre-dandre-perrin-scenes-de-vie-intellectuelle-france/ .

5 – “Beyond Formalization” interview with Peter Hallward and Bruno Bosteels from July 2, 2002, in Angelaki8:2 (2003), pp. 111-136. Reprinted in the appendix in Bruno Bosteels Badiou and Politics, Duke University Press, 2011, p. 338 et seq. ; the passage quoted is found on p. 339: “If it is really a matter of founding a new world, then the price paid by the old world, even in the number of deaths or the quantity of suffering, becomes a relatively secondary question”.