Another Front in the Cancel Culture Wars: Redeker on Houellebecq and the Grand Mosque of Paris

The following comments refer to Robert Redeker’s piece from Le Figaro on December 30, 2022, published in English translation on TelosScope here.

In a notable comment in The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud compares Oedipus Rex with Hamlet in order to describe what he calls “the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind.” Between Sophocles and Shakespeare, civilization underwent an enormous increase in the control of affect and a withering away of the formerly unmanaged space of some original freedom. Of course Freud was talking about widely separated historical moments, ancient Greece and Elizabethan England. Today, through hyper-acceleration in a much shorter period, we are undergoing a comparable quantum leap of control (see: surveillance) accompanied by restrictions on free speech and free thought unthinkable only a few decades ago.

As recently as the 1990s, the West was celebrating a victory of liberalism and the demise of the Communist system that had previously provided the model for Orwell’s 1984. But what followed? 9/11 and the War on Terror, the operations of social media and the elaboration of tools to track online behavior, and the willing surrender of liberties during the pandemic. Add to that the ideological disciplining that has come to dominate discourse in the cultural and educational spaces: China limits the films that Hollywood can produce, universities restrict what professors can say, and legislatures stipulate what teachers can address in school and what books must not be taught.

This widespread “advance of repression” obviously has multiple dimensions, with different textures in various countries. Here the focus is only on one important aspect, the encounter of Western societies with cultural expectations of Islamic communities, in the wake of considerable immigration as well as the interconnected communication patterns of globalization. Western norms of liberty, let alone the separation of religion from law, stand at odds with cultural habits from many Muslim-majority countries and with certain widespread but not necessarily uniform religious stipulations. In the end, what we have seen is a multi-stage erosion of Western standards of liberty through a series of challenges articulated by advocates of variants of Islamism. The story begins at the latest with the impact of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and especially, one decade later, the 1989 fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses. While many in the West rallied to defend the author, many others—including governments and the publishing industry—did not. Western commitment to its own self-understanding as free societies was already weak. In the wake of the 2005 controversy around Mohammed cartoons in the Danish journal Jyllands-Posten, the hostile response to Pope Benedict’s 2006 Regensburg Address similarly exposed a Western predisposition to cave in to forces calling for the silencing of critical voices: the robust and sometimes violent demonstrations in Muslim countries met timid and self-doubting reactions in the West. When Islamist radicals murdered members of the Charlie Hebdo staff in 2015, for a brief romantic moment the West seemed to rally around the banner of free speech, but the longer term trend has been to accept de facto restrictions, especially in the context of “cancel culture” and practices of “deplatforming” that emerged especially around 2020. It has become normal to try to silence one’s opponent rather than to persuade an interlocutor through argument and evidence. The ideological (“political correctness”) and technological (management of social media) tools to erase one’s opposition have become strong enough to challenge and perhaps overpower traditions of liberty or commitments to free thought.

Robert Redeker is part of this story. His 2006 opinion piece in Le Figaro critical of Islam provoked hostile reactions; death threats forced him into hiding and police protection. While some French intellectuals defended his rights, much official opinion kept its distance from him. In Redeker’s current comments published in TelosScope he addresses another figure relevant to these developments, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq. Houellebecq’s copious literary oeuvre cannot be described here in any detail. Suffice it however to say that his trenchant observations on alienated postmodern life in France have included reflections on Islam, immigration, and French nationhood. His 2015 novel Submission presents a speculative fiction of an Islamist party winning the 2022 presidential election and then placing France under sharia law. (In fact, no significant Islamist party competed in the 2022 election, although the strongly anti-immigrant party of Marie Le Pen won some 40 percent of the vote.)

Redeker’s comments involve an analytic reaction to charges filed by the Grand Mosque of Paris against Houellebecq for remarks the author made concerning religious tension in France. Where the Mosque sees Islamophobia, Redeker treats Houellebecq as a writer engaging with very real cultural challenges in contemporary society. In this reading, Houellebecq is not advocating conflict but rather tracing a development objectively unfolding in French society, a development with an equally objective potential for violence. Such is the work of an author. Redeker therefore characterizes the Grand Mosque’s charges as in effect an attack on the literary freedom of expression. For that reason, we can evaluate the Mosque’s efforts to punish Houellebecq as one more piece in the international repression of thought, the generalized tendency toward “canceling.”

In addition—beyond the principled questions of liberty of expression and free thought—Houellebecq’s remarks and Redeker’s defense of them testify to the extraordinary level of social tension in France at this historical moment, particularly in the wake of the Le Pen vote in last year’s election. At one point, Houellebecq is quoted as predicting a “Bataclan in reverse.” The reference is to a terrorist attack, or rather a group of attacks, by ISIS militants on November 13, 2015, including suicide bombers at a soccer game in the Stade de France, murders at cafés and restaurants, and finally mass shootings inside a concert at the Bataclan theater. Of the 130 who died in the attacks that day, 90 of the victims were at Bataclan. Bataclan in reverse? It is no secret that violence can unleash a chain of vengeance, as René Girard explained so vividly. Houellebecq is speculating that reciprocal terrorism against immigrants may take place. In addition, Redeker references Samuel Paty, a high school teacher, who was alleged to have shown images of Mohammed in a class in 2020 and was therefore subsequently attacked and beheaded. In the United States, there is much overheated talk about civil war. France may be closer, or such at least is Houellebecq’s suggestion.

Some of the specifics in these matters involve aspects that are distinctively French, including the large North African Muslim population (a legacy of colonialism) and the rigorous secularism associated with the understanding of laicité, quite different from attitudes toward state and religion in the United States or, for that matter, elsewhere in Europe. Yet in the big picture, the threat to liberty that Redeker identifies in the court procedure that the Mosque initiated against Houellebecq is very much resonant with wider developments, far beyond France: the encounter with certain versions of Islam as leading to a normalization of repressive practices and thereby contributing, beyond the Islamic context, to a much broader cultural retreat from freedom. This illiberalism takes place, more often than not, in the name of progressivism.

Telos depends on subscriptions in order to continue its work. You can help by subscribing or by downloading or ordering articles through your library. Your downloads and requests help to convince librarians to continue subscribing or to open a new subscription. Thank you for your support!