On the occasion of the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the 2015 attacks, and the evening organized jointly by the CRIF (Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions) and Charlie Hebdo, Bruno Karsenti questions the meaning of this alliance under the slogan “We are the Republic”. For if Jews have embraced the modern political condition, it is according to a critical modality that carries with it a certain understanding of the Republic.
In France, many things are played out around the word “Republic”. And what is currently at stake – in a recurrence that takes us back to the late 19th century, when antisemitism was establishing itself as the official party in this country – has the Jewish fact as its high point. This is how, in the last legislative elections, we saw the self-declared “Republican Front” reconstitute itself against an extreme right out in full force, whose old antisemitic background remains difficult to conceal despite repeated and demonstrative marks of atonement, and disregarding the undeniable convictions of its historic leader who has just passed away. But above all, this is exactly where the Front itself has cracked, with its attitude towards Jews, whether or not they are viewed in terms of their relationship with Israel, showing divisions just as deep as those motivated by opposition to a fascism which, whether through laziness or convenience, is thought to be housed exclusively on the right of the political spectrum.
Is it any wonder, then, that the word Republic is brandished by the Jews themselves, in a salutary tightening of focus on its core meaning, which is to guarantee the most exposed minorities not only equality before the law, but protection against all discrimination and persecution? And isn’t it right that this revival should take place on the occasion of the celebration of the January 2015 attacks, during which well-targeted assassinations were committed – in this case, of journalists fully exercising, within the limits of the law, their right to criticize religions in a republican state that is by definition secular, of police officers taken as public officers ensuring security in this type of state, and of Jews believing themselves to be able to enjoy the freedom, equality and safety guaranteed to everyone there?
The alliance between the CRIF (Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions) and Charlie Hebdo in the celebration of the January 2015 attacks, under the banner of “Nous sommes la République” (We are the Republic), will only seem incongruous to those who turn their backs on the most serious dilemmas of the moment. That the institution representing Jewish associative life (knowing that Jews, as a heterogeneous multiplicity, cannot be represented) and a newspaper that has made militant secularism its main credo, should make common cause on precisely this theme, is not only conceivable because Jews and satirical journalists have found themselves conjuncturally the victims of the same criminal will, in this case Islamism. The paradox has to do with a reason buried in this very real situation. This is that there is a link between the modern history of this particular community – where culture, belonging and religion are inextricably intertwined and enter into variable compositions – the Jews, and modern emancipation reconciled to its necessary condition, namely that criticism must be able, in a society where emancipation prevails, to strip all religious dogma of its claim to dictate common law.
Jews in general, pre-modern and modern, are those who “are not Gentiles”, as Lacan put it. Simply put, they are those who have refused to convert to Christianity. But what characterizes modern Jews, religious or not, is their unreserved embrace of the kind of conversion that civil and political emancipation entails. In so doing, they have not simply renewed their ancient precept as a people in exile – “the foreign law is the law” – but have banked on the fact that this law is no longer foreign to them in the same way when it is resolutely egalitarian, because, by the point at which it makes them equal to all other citizens, they can genuinely make it their own, and recognize in it a new condition, preferable to that which any other kind of state reserves for them, for the existence and persistence of their people.
What characterizes modern Jews, whether religious or not, is their unreserved embrace of the kind of conversion that comes with civil and political emancipation.
But they also know that this depends on the free exercise of criticism, up to the point where the principle of emancipation from all religious laws – their own as well as any other – proves its possibility. It’s a boundary, certainly, that the law itself frames. A place from which there is no injunction to surrender, i.e. no reason to adhere to what is drawn or said there. It’s a place where caricature is possible, and which, by its provocation, exposes itself to the sanction of the law, it being understood that the law is secular. But for this very reason it is preserved, as the ultimate entrenchment of a deep-rooted spring of emancipation.
Through their modern history, Jews know that the possibility for them, as for any minority, to exist freely and equally in a free society, ultimately depends on this condition. They know that the defense of any minority existence, and therefore the fight against racism, xenophobia and discrimination of all kinds, depends on it. In short, they know that the word “Republic” is constantly replaying its definition.
But there is a condition to this condition. It is that the Republic, in turn, does not dogmatize. That it sees its enlargement as essential, since in it lies the relaunch of an emancipation that is never definitively acquired for anyone, and is even always threatened, for any minority, in societies where the majority runs the perpetual risk of setting itself up as the exclusive and superior holder of common standards. Once again, the Republic is the key to preventing this drift, but only if we make the effort to understand it in a certain way: as the political form ordered to the public thing, res publica, the common thing around which the actions of individuals and groups are articulated in a just manner. Actions that have their principle of justice in the fact of acting in common on problems that all recognize as being common to them.
From here, it is common today to move surreptitiously to the affirmation of a common self. Losing sight of the common thing, it’s the large-format subjective identity that takes center stage. The greatest ills of today’s democratic societies stem directly from the recomposition of group identities as fixed properties, as something already given and possessed, to be asserted rather than defended. If the drift has its minority versions, it obviously also has its majority version, in which a false understanding of the word Republic is easily enlisted. In this case, the first victims of the drift are the minorities themselves, insofar as they are committed to the process of emancipation, from which they draw in modernity the conditions of an egalitarian and free existence for their members, however qualified by their belonging they may remain.
There is a condition to this condition. It is that the Republic, in turn, does not dogmatize.
In this respect, the phrase “We are the Republic” needs to be clarified. The “we” expressed here, in the unison voice of Jews and journalists, cannot and must not be the “common self” in which France is invited to recognize and identify itself. Rather, it designates a certain point in social space: the point at which a decisive aspect of the common thing appears, in its urgency and with the imperative of its assumption by all, i.e. by the social and political totality which, through this action alone, acquires its character as a national community.
What does this mean? First and foremost, that the attacks of January 2015, through their victims and the singular place they occupy in modern democratic societies, tragically represented the crossroads where the meaning of the word Republic is called upon to search for itself today. Or rather, to search for itself. For it is by no means a foregone conclusion. The task has only just begun, and nothing would be more damaging than to retreat, under the weight of the adversity in which we find ourselves, into a new dogma that tends to be reactionary.
But for this research to take place, it’s clear that it’s precisely the Jewish question that we need to take as our starting point. What does it teach us about the position of the general problem of the “common good” and how to order the actions of individuals and groups around it – a problem which, in the idea of the Republic, remains the essential point? And what does it prevent from drifting into the instantiation and absolutization of the “common self”, where republicanism always risks degenerating into nationalism?
This is what the alliance between the CRIF and Charlie Hebdo, by its unexpected, even iconoclastic character, should be able to make clear to the widest possible public. Making this commemoration of a great French trauma a moment of salutary reflection, for the benefit of all minorities.
Bruno Karsenti
