On Giving and Taking Offense

Soon after the attacks of Friday, 13 November 2015 in Paris, John Kerry said this at a press conference:

There’s something different about what happened [Friday] from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus… a rationale that you could attach yourself to, somehow, and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate.¹

Indiscriminate attacks against civilians, including children, have become wretchedly familiar. To be sure, the assassins are never at a loss for an explanation: tit for tat, retaliations for such and such military action. But Kerry was not wrong to make a distinction: the victims of Charlie Hebdo had been chosen with focus and rationale. Those killings were a response, a kind of barbaric message. That is why, in their wake, more than two million people marched across France. They carried signs bearing the image of Voltaire with which they told each other and the world that they rejected the logic of that response, even as they debated about free speech and satire; about the clash between religion and laicité; about the culture of ‘68. After the November massacre, it was different. There were no mass gatherings, no discussions, no self-questioning. No posters of Voltaire. Only vigils and silence.

The ground seemed to have been pulled out from under those discussions after the more recent atrocities, whose motives seemed more baffling and unmanageable than the murder-execution of the blasphemous cartoonists. Yet, we cannot remain silent and simply abandon the field to specialists, experts in mental health or, worse, the military. Understanding the connection between speech and violence is still our responsibility as citizens and students of the Enlightenment.

I am going to explore that connection by discussing the nature of our competing commitments to the sacred. For even within our broadly secular communities in France and the United States, there are areas of sacredness, places we do not want to go to for fear of saying the wrong thing. We are willing to invest a great deal of symbolic violence against those who, in our opinion, violate or desecrate these spaces. As crowds, journalists, and political figures rallied to defend the apparently sacred Enlightenment principle of freedom of speech, a competing sacrality soon came into play: the sacrality of feelings as a political factor.

When PEN awarded its Freedom of Expression Courage award to Charlie Hebdo, some of its members, including novelists Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, and Teju Cole, boycotted the gala ceremony in protest. Carey declared: “A hideous crime was committed, but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about?” He added that PEN had shown itself to be blind to “the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population.”²

Teju Cole wrote that Charlie had gone “specifically for racist and Islamophobic provocations. […] It is not always easy to see the difference between a certain witty dissent from religion and a bullyingly racist agenda, but it is necessary to try.”³ Garry Trudeau, the author of Doonesbury, went a step further, arguing that the cartoonists were responsible for the deaths that occurred during the violent protests “triggered” by their drawings (as if only the cartoonist had agency, not the people protesting):

By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech, which in France is only illegal if it directly incites violence. Well, voilà—the 7 million copies that were published following the killings did exactly that, triggering violent protests across the Muslim world, including one in Niger, in which ten people died.⁴

The principle that satire ought to be punching upward against the powerful, not against the powerless, might seem unobjectionable. Early-modern French theorists of sociability always emphasized that raillerie – which covered a broad range of verbal and social transgressions from banter, mockery, derision, to satire and lampoon – was to...