Maria Laura Avignolo
04/06/2021 19:59
Clarín.com
Magazine Ñ
Updated 04/06/2021 20:01
When the French essayist Guy Sorman wrote
My Bullshit Dictionary
, he was in New York and his editor demanded that it be reduced to 300 pages.
From A to Z, a selection of provocative words
: from Albion, Celine, Corruption, Politically correct, Charles de Gaulle, Yellow Vests, Migration, Anti-Semitism and all the icons of France.
“I was always struck in political, economic or intellectual speeches by that mixture between the true and the false that tries to pass itself off as true.
The distinction in French does not exist;
that's why I borrowed the Anglo-Saxon term bullshit, for which there is no equivalent.
Bullshit is very clear: it is a lie that pretends to pass for a truth
”.
Sorman never imagined that page 286 would be the most mediatic.
In it, he chose to reflect on pedophilia and an issue that was not a secret among the “Parisian intelligentsia”:
he wondered how far Michel Foucault, the totem of French intellectuals, was a pedophile
and, at the same time, worked as a predatory white colonialist of Arab minors.
The scene of their acts, after 10 o'clock at night, was the Sidi Bou Said cemetery, the tiny Tunisian town where Guy Sorman spent his vacations.
Foucault is well known in Argentina, he read it to him early
and his influence was felt not only in philosophy, but also in law, psychoanalysis, anthropology, political science, and even architecture, among other key areas of theory and practice.
The role of the "MeToo" movement and the resistance of French intellectuals to review Foucault's behavior are some of the issues he addressed by phone, from his confinement in his country house in Normandy, which he shares with his wife and their animals.
With humor and an irony close to sarcasm, this was the dialogue he had with
Ñ
.
In it he resigns himself to thinking that what has changed are the times.
In his book, Sorman wondered to what extent Michel Foucault, the totem of French intellectuals, was a pedophile.
- How did the idea of this
Bullshit Dictionary come about?
How is it related to fake news, fake news?
- It came like this, brutally, because all my intellectual reflection has always been to distinguish what is true from what is falsely true.
This book is part of a very old trajectory of distinguishing the truth from the lie for me
.
Fake news is one of the ingredients of bullshit, that kind of ideological cloud that hangs over us.
The
news fake
one duct that feeds the bullshit, part of it.
But the bullshit is a more encompassing philosophical notion.
I quote the famous American philosopher Harry Frankfurt and his work On Bullshit, which shows that this is a truly total ideological system.
- Why did you decide to write about pedophilia, the subject that everyone is talking about?
- I confess very surprised that this chapter has made so much noise.
Revealing that the philosopher Michel Foucault was a pedophile is not news either ... Foucault himself, in 1977, signed a manifesto, claiming that no law prohibited sexual relations with children.
He was a declared pedophile in his time and no one was shocked.
Now suddenly everyone is impressed.
At least the
intelligentsia is
, because this kind of Parisian intellectual aristocracy has not yet understood - or does not accept - that we have changed the era.
From now on, there will no longer be two morals but only one, the same rod for all.
- How is that, did not end the French Revolution?
-In France traditionally there were two morals: morality for the people and morality for the aristocracy.
Intellectuals like Foucault were the aristocracy;
they believed that common morality did not apply to them
.
The reaction to what I wrote about Foucault proves that, deep down, this intellectual aristocracy has not yet understood the scope of the “MeToo”.
Or the fact that -from now on- the rules and laws are the same for everyone.
It is a revolution!
This intellectual aristocracy has lost their privileges but they still do not realize it.
Camille Kouchner's book The Big Family revealed a case of incest that shocked the whole of France.
Photo by Thomas SAMSON / AFP.
- Were you inspired by the Duhamel affair? (the abuse and incest case that shook France a month ago).
- There were two instances here;
first, against the writer Gabriel Matzneff, whom Valeria Spingora denounced in
El Consent
(just published in Buenos Aires) for promoting pedophilia in his books;
and then the case against the political scientist Olivier Duhamel (accused by his stepdaughter, the jurist Camille Kouchner, of sexual abuse in the book
The Big Family
).
I wrote my dictionary between the two complaints.
The Matzneff affair is a kind of "Metoo" of pedophilia in France
;
revolutionary on behavior towards women.
Matzneff's "Metoo" denounces the dominant position of the white man over girls, and now, with Foucault, the "Metoo" of pedophilia was launched.
The Duhamel case confirms this sexual revolution, or moral and legal revolution that is taking place, which not everyone accepts.
Some insist that pedophilia should be protected.
I say, "No, it's over."
- Pedophilia in France is a matter of double standards? Is it a crime depending on who commits it?
–Absolutely, like any sexual or financial transgression…
France has always been the country of double standards
.
Not only in the field of sexuality;
It is not a republic, it is a monarchical country, with a strong central power.
And like any monarchical country, there is an aristocracy.
Of course, the aristocracy is no longer the traditional nobility that existed in the king's time.
It is a new nobility, based on money and notoriety, on access to the media.
This new nobility is our new aristocracy.
This double standard in a way defines us.
And what we observe today is precisely a true revolution, where the old double standard is over.
The laws on pedophilia are the same for everyone.
That is why the entire structure of French society is called into question in this affair.
- And why does France accept the sexual abuse of Roman Polanski, or Gabriel Matzneff?
- If there is a debate it is because we are facing a revolution.
What characterizes a revolution?
In that sometimes the innocent are punished.
I don't know if Polanski is guilty or not;
but I am simply saying that what characterizes a revolution is that the victims are heard, for the first time.
But there are also innocents who are going to have their heads cut off ... The debate only confirms this revolutionary nature of things.
In fact, it is normal for there to be resistance from the aristocracy.
- French intellectuals are especially far from the idea of decency?
-Yes.
I don't want to generalize but there is a long tradition.
You don't have to be indecent to be talented.
Cezanne, Matisse, they were very decent, bourgeois and conservative.
Romain Rolland, whom I consider to be the great writer of the 20th century, was very normal;
Raymond Aron led a bourgeois life.
You don't have to have a scandalous or complicated life to be a great artist.
But it is true that the indecency in the artist and the intellectual was protected;
in a way, he participated in a privilege.
You have to go to Voltaire, when he says that religion is good for the people, but not for him.
That is the principle of double standards.
Religion is fine for the people but we intellectuals do not need it.
This tradition dates back to at least the 18th century and is a constant in French culture.
In a way, France is not a republic, which affirms a society where the principles are the same for everyone.
France is not fundamentally republican.
Matzneff joined the aristocracy for his connections rather than his talents.
Foucault is considered an aristocrat of French thought.
So the norms of social behavior did not apply to him.
However, what is extraordinary about Foucault, which makes him so interesting, is that all his work is a denunciation of aristocratic power.
He forgets to apply his analytical perspective to his own life.
That Foucault was a pedophile, everyone knew;
but the interesting thing is that Foucault is blind to himself.
- The so-called "late sixties" intellectuals (around 68) consider that the law is oppression by the State?
"Yes, that is partly true."
All of Foucault's work is a denunciation of the oppression hidden behind the law, the republic, equality, madness, crime.
If I apply Foucault's method to himself when he pays a young man for sex in Tunisia, I am in a position to say:
“Mr. Foucault, you exercise your power as an old imperialist white man over a young Arab who does not have the power to refuse
.
How do you reconcile that with your denunciation of imperialism, colonialism and racism? "
Gabriel Matzneff narrated in his books the pedophile excursions that he carried out outside of France.
Photo: Jacques Demarthon / Agence France-Presse - Getty Images
- Do you see a racist component in this pedophilia; could I have done the same in France?
- Obviously not;
that's why he did it in Tunisia.
But that is not new.
André Gide, notorious pedophile and Nobel Prize winner for Literature, was going to Algeria and the Congo for this very reason
.
Today we have sex tourism;
there is a kind of democratization of pedophilia, with men going to Thailand or the Philippines.
There is the racist, neo-colonial and imperialist component.
It is because I am a white man and I have money that I can go to exotic lands, while I cannot do it in my country.
- On the other hand, the Tunisian state was aware of everything, why allow it? If you know that there is child exploitation ...
- It is a question that Tunisians are asking today.
In the Tunisian press they are now talking about precisely this Foucault affair
.
Many Tunisian journalists wonder how the state could have let it happen.
Because in a way the colonial idea was internalized by the local leaders.
Tunisia was not yet fully decolonized.
Foucault's behavior and the passivity of the Tunisian government show that decolonization was not finished, neither in Foucault's head nor in the Tunisian leaders.
- At the same time, in 1977 Foucault publicly supported the suppression of all sexual age of majority. Among other firms was that of Françoise Dolto, the adolescent psychoanalyst. Do post-68 intellectuals see the law as a form of oppression of sexual desires?
–The most surprising signature is that of Dolto;
evidence that she did not understand that rape creates irreparable trauma in the child
.
We are thus obliged to question their competence ... I always thought that Dolto was a fraud;
That she signed that document proves that she was an imposter.
You mention the intellectuals of '68 - if we can speak so simply - but I was too and I never understood the law as sexual oppression.
The '68 movement was very diverse: there were liberals like me, Maoists and Trotskyists.
What the intellectuals of 68 did not understand was that the law is oppressive but indispensable.
What is a society without limits?
The thinking of '68 was very poor and quite ignorant about sociology and anthropology.
No one had read Claude Levi-Strauss.
That is why '68 was a revolt but not a revolution.
-Is there a false freedom of 68 or a false interpretation of 68, in the use of freedom?
- In
My Dictionary ...
I affirm that the most remarkable thing about May '68 is that the weather was very good ... It was an exceptional spring;
if it had rained, the May would have been inconceivable.
Was it a liberation movement?
I will talk later about the negative inheritance maybe but there is a positive inheritance.
French society in '68 was really oppressive;
General Charles De Gaulle was very old and had us rotten.
The French church is very authoritarian, the French business community and the university priests too.
It was a society that drowned you.
I was finishing my studies and there was a desire to breathe.
May 68 was that desire to breathe, which has very good results.
In a general way, the French hierarchical system after 1968 frees itself from useless oppressions and develops a critical spirit.
The other inheritance is this Foucault-style interpretation of every law and every norm as repressive in itself.
There really isn't much left of that, because it was a completely idiotic idea, not based on any social analysis.
The great error of this thought of 68 is not being able to understand the need for order, in the philosophical sense of the subject: the need for the law with a capital letter, and the need for myths.
This Edgard Morin said with great intelligence: you cannot live in a society without myths.
–While you were spending your holidays there, in Tunisia, you saw Foucault buy children to take them to the Sidi Bou Said cemetery. Were they raped over the graves?
- Rape is not the word.
They had sex with them.
(N. de la R. in the book, Sorman uses the verb violer, in French).
Yes, apparently spoiled. Why did it take so long to tell and why now?
- The extraordinary thing is that I already told it many times!
Two years ago I published an article in the US on Foucault, where I said the same thing.
When I said it, they retorted: "And what is the problem?"
Foucault has the right to everything.
I am not the one who changed.
It is the time that changed.
What I said in desert, and now suddenly it makes a lot of noise.
Incest.AP - Francois Mori
-Foucault could not ignore that they were victims of an old white imperialist, did you prefer to believe in free consent?
- Probably it suited his conscience to think that: to think that these children loved him.
André Gide thought the same.
I remember Foucault in the streets of Bidi Bou Said and those boys who ran after him and called him: “Michel, Michel!”.
He thought that was love
.
And maybe he was getting by with his conscience saying "these guys love me", "I give them money because they are poor."
So there is a mental construction that I imagine in him.
He is not able to analyze himself and see that he is a white colonizer.
I think it does not even problematize the question of consent.
What does it mean?
It means that he is a hypocrite
.
I don't want to reduce him to being a man of his time.
We all are. Basically, we suddenly discover that there is a weakness in Foucault's reasoning, that he sees in society something that deep down is good for him.
What we have in mind, we assume is the result of our intelligence and analysis of the world;
But in truth, we are all in the bullshit.
And it is very difficult to think for yourself, independently of our time.
- What to do with his figure and his work?
–It has to be read in another way.
My position - I would have it on Gauguin and the literatures of André Gide and the Marquis de Sade - is that they are great artists.
You have to read them, I am never in favor of the "culture of cancellation", but on the contrary, in favor of an enriched look
.
We believe that Foucault is the man of all liberations and that is not so because he himself was not entirely liberated.
He was a prisoner of colonialist stereotypes, for example.
For me, it is an old debate.
Marcel Proust took a position saying that the life of an author has no interest, you only have to look at the work.
And others say no, you have to look at the author.
It is a very, very old debate.
My position is intermediate: knowing the infamies or the good deeds of the author enriches the reading and the gaze.
- Do you consider that the French intellectuals used their arguments to justify passions and desires? Was Foucault convinced of this attitude that allowed him to do what he wanted or was it a transgression?
-It is very difficult to answer that question.
Not even he could answer that question.
It should be possible to do a retrospective psychoanalysis of Foucault.
I remember Foucault's behavior in Tunisia.
All right, how can I interpret it?
Hypocrisy, tartufism, schizophrenia, enjoyment of transgression, ignorance of being the heir to an old world that he himself denounces?
All these explanations are possible but I cannot choose any.
I think that they are all true, that all that is mixed.
Foucault at heart is still in the old world while denouncing the old world.
He is pulled between two worlds: the world he comes from, which I would call the world of old French intellectuals, whites, dominant university priests, and the world he denounces, which is the world of abuse of power.
He is actually divided between the two: voluntarily or involuntarily.
It must then be read keeping in mind that this author who exults in liberation is not himself a liberated author.
- Certainly, he was not the only one. What do we do with Paul Gauguin in Polynesia?
- First, distinguish between those who did work and those who did not.
Gabriel Matzneff did not write anything;
it's ridiculous.
Olivier Duhamel did not write a single book.
So I have compassion for Foucault, who bequeathed us a philosophical work, and for Gauguin, a giant of painting.
They are not all on the same plane.
And let's remember once again that there is no necessary correlation between talent and perversion.
There are cursed artists and others who are not.
Foucault and Gide must be read with a supplement of conscience
.
I was curious to reread Gide about his pedophilia, which he doesn't hide at all.
Although he tells us about his love affairs in detail, at the same time he exposes his pain because he is pulled between his Christian upbringing, as a very severe Protestant, and suffers for what he does.
Foucault is much less intelligent and honest;
He could have told us: "What I do contradicts what I advocate."
Then it would have been interesting to know the suffering of Foucault.
But he has not suffered, or perhaps he died too young to share it.
"Foucault at heart is still in the old world while denouncing the old world," says Sorman.
- How do young people read Foucault? Do you think the values have changed?
"I have no idea how much they read it."
At the same time, there are Foucault contributions to modern thought accepted all over the world.
What he wrote about the history of madness is perhaps the most interesting of his historical work, more than philosophical;
it is a Foucault dimension that today is part of the corpus… Foucault, but also Roland Barthes and Derrida, that seeing beyond the real, are integrated into postmodern thought.
But his history of sexuality will no longer be read by anyone, because it is unreadable.
- What was the role of social networks in the complaints of sexual abuse, in general?
"Obviously decisive."
There are no intellectual revolutions that have not been preceded by a technical revolution even though the intellectuals do not like this deterministic idea
.
It is even banal: without Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, Luther and the reform would not have existed.
Without the press accessible to all in France in the mid-18th century, the French Revolution would not have existed.
And without social media, there would have been no "Metoo" or this moral revolution we are witnessing.
Without radio, there would have been no Hitler, and without television there would have been no Kennedy.
So social, political, ideological revolutions always have a technical basis, if you will.
And there, the technical base is social networks, because they allow victims to speak.
This is the big change.
Before using social networks, no one listened to the victims. Suddenly we realize that there is not one victim but thousands who communicate.
Networks are the condition of this sexual moral revolution.
- And how do you interpret the silence of the intellectuals before this “sacred cow”, but also of the politicians, from the right and the left?
–There is no such silence.
I quote in my book the forgotten minister of culture, Franck Riester, who said, "from now on, talent does not excuse perversion."
It is interesting coming from the Ministry of Culture, because it is the Ministry of Culture that, since Louis XIV, in France has always financed the wicked.
For a current minister to say: "From now on I am not financing the wicked, even if they have talent", is a strong political act that deserves to be highlighted.
–And you in this Dictionary decided to attack all the French intellectual taboos and myths, it seems.
- Yes. But not just the French.
Many live in this bullshit cloud, where it is extraordinarily difficult to distinguish the true from the false.
Therefore, I try to thresh, as is done with wheat or potatoes.
A threshing between what is exact and what is not quite, and what is inaccurate.
And the intelligentsia is the most exposed to mix these categories, when their role is to tell the truth.
- Is it a battle against established ideas?
–I prefer to call them “received idea”, the expression that Gustave Flaubert uses (in Spanish the work was also translated as Dictionary of topics).
It is an idea that has the air of being true even though it is false.
As in Flaubert, it is a chic idea, but it is inaccurate or unverifiable, but it gives the person who expresses it social and intellectual status.
The great victory of bullshitism is that the one who expresses it is in a position of strength, with respect to whoever investigates the truth.
Because bullshit is more acceptable.
Searching for the truth is tiring, requires a lot of perspiration, while adopting a bullish stance is easy, carries immediate power and prestige.
So it is exactly the way that Flaubert adopts in his Dictionary: taking sides with reality, rather than with power.
-He chose issues such as Albion (symbol of England, context for Brexit), immigration, Islam, the end of history, political correctness. All to synthesize a new world of received ideas, both personal and historical. How did you choose the tickets?
- We live in a kind of theater, in a contemporary opera.
And we are the audience of the world's show and the ideas received, the bullshit, are a bit of the set.
And many people mistake it for reality.
I make a little hole in the set, let's say like this.
One believes that it is reality but it is an artifice.
The book is a kind of humorous denunciation.