This text was previously published in the Revue des deux mondes, November 2022, https://www.revuedesdeuxmondes.fr/article-revue/le-role-de-la-violence-dans-lhistoire-du-wokisme/
To qualify an action as "violent", an individual endowed with reason, possessing the faculty of judgment, must exercise force. The Civil Code defines it as follows: "There is violence when it is of a nature to make an impression on a reasonable person, and when it can inspire in him the fear of exposing his fortune or his person to considerable harm" (art. 1112). It is therefore by metonymy, by figure of semantic shift, that we speak of violence in nature: a storm or a bear are not violent since, not being endowed with reason, they only exert a constraining force in the eyes of the human observer. The storm is not the expression of any dominant will punishing men; the bear obeys its instinct. Violence is in the eyes of the man who judges it. Machiavelli[2] proposes a distinction between two forms of judgments on violence: restorative violence on the one hand, that is to say the violence that one claims to exercise legitimately for the good of others (to educate, instruct, correct them) or of oneself (warrior heroism, self-sacrifice); and destructive violence, of which we consider that others are guilty when they openly manifest by force the desire to break the laws. Violence is an act of force that opposes two wills: the executioner and the guilty party, for example.
Its remedy, or its antithesis, is speech – that is, language that substitutes the mediation of reasoning for direct action. It is therefore yet another abuse of language that pushes our contemporaries to want to find violence in speeches. It is obviously not a question of denying the idea that violent and death-related impulses, such as hatred, can be carried by speeches and lead to feelings of offense and fear in their recipients. But a speech of violence cannot be confused with violence itself, because as long as someone is threatened with death – paradoxically – they are not killed. And the courts have so far been able to qualify threats only less seriously than actions. In a word: threatening with death is reprehensible, but less so than killing. But it is sometimes a convenient rhetorical strategy to reinforce the metonymy that makes violent speech a violence since any contradiction can be perceived as an offense, that is to say an attack, therefore a constraint: and ultimately an act of violence. This is a game of "marabout-piece of string" that works at full speed in the discourse of sophists and politicians who do not bother with nuances. "Speech acts" in Austin's sense and "act" in the legal sense end up merging: it is a dangerous slope that should not be taken. It would lead to condemnation for thought crimes. We find this mechanism in the process of political anathematization intoned against political minority divergences that make "extremes" the place of rhetorical banishment and punitive calculation in the name of the condemnation of "rhetorical violence[3] ", "hate speech"[4] and “revolutionary sermons”[5].
There is certainly a link between the discourse advocating violence and terrorist action; but the search for the root cause and its eradication remains a difficult game because in the end, justice can only decide by looking for the motivations in the heart of the murderer and not in that of his father or grandfather. As for understanding why the one who holds a hate speech does not act; and why the one who hears it acts - this is a mystery to the intelligence of men since Aristotle. Thought crime, or crime of opinion, is not recognized in continental law. Speaking of sophists, we come to question the irruption on the political scene of the subversive movement, in line with the theologies of liberation, of "wokism" whose mystical character borrows from Marxist communism the pretension of wanting to resolve history. Bringing together different radicalities from the protest movements – notably French – of the 70s that wanted the advent of a new world (radical ecology, neo-feminism, racialism), these schools of thought breaking with the immediate past protest their enlightened commitment. They replay ad nauseam the scene of the Renaissance finally getting rid of the dark Middle Ages to enter fully into Modernity: that of religious wars, technology at the service of the murderous madness of states and tribal wars of possession. Borrowing in a degraded way from Marxist discourse some rarely sourced leitmotifs, the thought of "violence" is omnipresent in the paradigm of the research of the decolonials. But if violence, as theorized by Engels, legitimately occupied a central place in the revolutionary catechism of the communists of the XNUMXth century, it is in the decolonial discourse tinged with reproachful morality. In a word, Wokism rehabilitates Dürrhing's discourse, which agreed with Protestant morality to condemn violence, whereas Engels made it an essential dynamic. Even when they evoke Fanon[6], who was nevertheless a revolutionary activist, is to exonerate him: we speak of "decolonial emancipation" as opposed to "pure" or "fascist" violence of the colonial West.[7].
Updating the Machiavellian definition of “legitimate” and therefore innocent violence, decolonial discourse overwhelms its adversaries by imposing on them the moral, even Christian, condemnation of “violence.” This rhetorical trap, as old as the world, nevertheless works wonderfully. The word is thus repeated ad nauseam to justify militant research on the basis of the legitimacy conferred on it by citizen indignation. Let us take just one example: in the thesis Towards a Radical Consciousness of Liberation: Palestinian and Israeli Narratives of Decolonial Trans/formation[8] The author presents the scope of his work: "This research aims to understand the biographical pathways that lead participants to operate counter-hegemonic performances in their daily lives". It is difficult to understand here in what scientific context the question of the "biographical pathway" as an object of research arises. Are these "biographical stories"? "Life stories"? How is it a research material? We will not know, but "violence" justifies everything:
“Colonial consciousness […] is linked to a hegemonic position of power, violence and arrogance. This research shows that Zionism is defined by all participants as a foundation of oppression […] it does not determine the fate of Ashkenazi Jewish Israeli, Mizrahi Jewish Israeli and Palestinian participants in the same way.”
Focused on the theology of liberation, here of Israeli hegemony opposed to the “decolonial liberation process”, “violence” is considered self-evident to describe Israeli society. It is mentioned here as one would mention the symptom of an illness to be treated quickly and the metaphor easily continues by making decolonialism the remedy; and the researcher: the doctor. We therefore understand that the denunciation of violence as the fact of a tyrannical hegemonism is enough in itself to justify “counter-hegemonism” which could not be anti-Semitic in this case since it is self-declared legitimate. And this thesis illustrates well the relationship that decolonialists have with violence, a sin inherent in oppressive power structures, against which it is obvious that one must revolt – which dispenses with justifying one’s research, methodology and object. In speaking here of "sin", we are referring to a passage from Engels' Theory of Violence which inspires decolonial reform in its struggle "against outdated political forms" embodied by European democracies and their universities:
"According to Herr Dühring, violence is the absolute evil. The first act of violence is the first sin. His book is a long lament on the original sin that has contaminated all of history up to the present day […] But violence also assumes another function in history: the revolutionary function […] It is the tool used by the social movement […] to break outdated political forms."[9].
These researchers actually transpose into research the "direct action" of Georges Sorel against the "eloquence of the tribunes"[10] which they sovereignly despise and make of their research an act of active revolt in the service of the liberation which they believe they are describing, against the "objective science" against which he rebels[11]. We then see the emergence of a closed system, having determined its lexicon and its references, to establish a representation of the world in the service of the progressive ideology that it serves. In a 2019 thesis defended in Toulouse devoted to “alternative feminist socio-environmental empowerment” – a title where it is difficult to list the number of lexical bifurcations used – we can thus read: “The articulated analysis of gender violence and violence against nature highlights the renewed links between patriarchy and coloniality and shows a sentipensée politicization of activists”. Here again, the invocation of “violence”, in figurative use at each occurrence, constructs a penalization of the remark on the basis of a simple metaphor: “doing violence to nature is like doing violence to a woman”: it is therefore rape. Once the characterization of the crime is established, it is easy to understand that any research based on this discursive mechanism becomes an indictment of the guilty party (the white and heterosexual colonial patriarchy) and a plea for everything that is subversive. "Plea" and "indictment" were not words in the vocabulary of research in the humanities or social sciences: but we are witnessing a diversion based on a new code of procedures. Research must, in the name of a new moral order, be at the service of a clearly identifiable commitment restoring something that has been lost according to the sociologist's reading grid.[12].
Feeling thus legitimate to act against the symbolic violence that these so-called researchers observe everywhere where decolonialism interferes, we observe decolonial action seizing in turn the means and discourses of legitimate violence. Acting in this way, they take up the discourses of the anti-cleric in the sense given to this word by Julien Benda when he writes: "I attack him [the cleric who adheres to socialist theses, editor's note][13]] all the more so since he often exalts these means […] in themselves, for example the suppression of freedom, the contempt for the truth; in which he then adopts a system of values identical to that of the anticleric.[14]Let us recall what an example of a decolonial action is. As part of a second-year course at the University of Paris-2-Saint-Denis on February 8, 11, devoted to representations of the Dreyfus Affair, we were supposed to talk about Roman Polanski's film J'accuse. During the next session, on February 2020, a group of about fifteen young people entered. They announced that they were there to prevent the discussion and that they would not leave the room until the teacher assured them that she would not talk about it. A young woman accused the teacher of complicity and the teacher was ordered to be quiet. Intimidated by both the verbal violence and the physical presence of these people, the teacher tried to speak again. She was told that being “dominant” she had to keep quiet. Suppression of freedom. Contempt for the truth. This anamnesis characterizes many of the decolonial assaults in the exchanges that take place during debates.[15] when it is not during meetings at the University where the stakes of symbolic confrontation – money, salary, rewards – are the result of collective decisions. Let us recall that in October 2019, the essayist Mohamed Sifaoui, author of Taqiyya. How the Muslim Brotherhood Wants to Infiltrate France (Editions de l'Observatoire), saw the training he was to lead there entitled "Prevention of radicalization: understanding a phenomenon and detecting weak signals" cancelled by the Presidency of the Sorbonne on the pretext that the title was, according to colleagues, "problematic". Very recently, in June 2022, Leonardo Orlando (PhD in political science at Sciences Po Paris and postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cognitive Studies at ENS), and Peggy Sastre (PhD in philosophy of science, essayist, translator and journalist at Le Point) saw two courses on "biological, evolutionary and cognitive approaches to human behavior" abruptly canceled by management under threatening pressure from a laboratory specializing in gender studies, which saw such teaching of "biology" as a contradiction of the ideology usually professed.
Is this principle of segregation comparable to the violence done to the teacher during her class, who is physically prevented from speaking? Yes, obviously. Because what characterizes the development of decolonial direct action in these examples is the assignment to silence – the refusal of all logos, of all contradiction and the exercise of force to submit an inferiorized will. It is therefore a real and concrete violence, which is neither pure nor legitimate. And in this sense, if we can admit that for Popper, the foundation of the open society is a democracy guided by reason, we understand here that the woke movement reveals itself to be a grimacing imposture of rationality. The curious economy of decolonial thought wants us to believe that teaching History is “indoctrinating” students. “Imposing” a grammar on them would be to lock them up because “French belongs to [them]”[16]. The secular framework of the secularization of shared spaces is under threat. “Race” is promoted as a “grid for reading the world,” in the very words of the President of the CNRS. In reality, the violence is indeed on the side of decolonial thought, which intends to impose silence on those who do not fit into the framework that they claim to impose in the name of an ideology that they struggle to name. The open society, presented as an improbable horizon, is only a pretext to legitimize in the eyes of its zealous promoters the exercise of force for the advent of an “open future.”[17]Who does not see the seeds of tyranny in this masquerade?
