Article by Karl Kraus

How does the most “critical” fringe of French universities justify its desire to boycott Israeli higher education institutions? Our resident watchdog, Karl Kraus, has looked into the report commissioned by a number of lecturers and students at Sciences Po Strasbourg to assert the need to break off all partnerships with Reichmann University. All he discovered was the frustration of searching for guilt without finding it, and the perfidy of maintaining the initial bias despite everything.

Among all the more or less pleasant letters sent to the K. editorial team , one in particular warmed our hearts, so much so that Julia Christ read it out at our K. on stage evening in Paris in December. It comes from one of our most esteemed contributors who, paradoxically, has just discovered that he writes for the magazine.

Our dear collaborator Karl Kraus has entrusted us with the fruit of his summer labors: two short texts inspired by events whose banality seemed to him to be fraught with meaning. From a Viennese park to a Parisian kosher supermarket, a short sentence is sometimes enough to bear witness to the stupidity of the times, or, on the contrary, to aptly express their grueling nature.

The stupidity of the discourse produced by the situation in Gaza is flourishing everywhere, in all camps. But it’s the stupidity of the intellectual elites that we need to focus on. After all, isn’t it their job to enlighten the world rather than obscure it? Isn’t that the function our societies have attributed to them? Our contributor Karl Kraus is convinced of this. That’s why he wonders about Judith Butler’s recent attempt to dumb down public opinion even further, a rhetorician by trade, but commonly presented as a philosopher and honored as one of the great minds of our time.

This week, our colleague Karl Kraus looks at the strange tendency of a considerable number of ultra-progressive, even revolutionary, activists to defend movements whose stated aim is to destroy them. Read about talking chickens, Queers for Palestine, lying and perfidious Jews, pinkwashing and the new concept of an old-fashioned avant-garde.

Between the first and second rounds of the French presidential election, the voice of student protest made itself heard, first at the Sorbonne, then at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), where a building was defaced. The watchword of the movement at both institutions was the rejection of a binary choice between ‘fascism’ and ‘neoliberalism.’ But at the EHESS campus, where the students covered the walls in graffiti (much of it quite vitriolic), authorities noticed some antisemitic messages. The students explained themselves about this matter: “The occupation is antifascist and firmly condemns any antisemitic act. We erased the hateful drawings that unfortunately appeared on some of the walls, and we would have erased [the messages], had we seen them.”

From “La France, tu l’aimes ou tu la quittes” (“France, love it or leave it”) to “La France, tu l’assumes ou tu la quittes” (“France, live with it, or leave it”), the far-right polemicist Eric Zemmour puffs up his chest and radicalizes the nationalist exhortation. A sarcastic analysis of what the term “assume” or “live with it” might mean in the Zemmourian imagination of France.