The real issue with the blunder of Carros’ UMP municipal councilor, Estelle Borne, who shared racist comments on her Facebook page—which, upon verification, were found not to belong to the person who shared them—is not so much her alleged complicity with the authors of “such hateful remarks,” as considered by Fouzia Ayoub, federal secretary for Equality at PS06, who invites her to exercise more restraint: “In a particularly tense context, freedom of expression is not about saying just anything, but about weighing one’s words according to the responsibilities entrusted to us.”
The real problem is the abandonment of all discernment and reflection before expressing oneself. The fascination with new technologies, which make immediacy the reference time, with the almost pathological need to voice an opinion on every occasion, leading to the pathology of making others say what one may not know or lacks the courage to say oneself.
Estelle Borne’s serious mistake is not being racist, as she is probably like many “a right-winger sensitive to fascist ideas,” but rather using these modern weapons, social media and their language, as gunslingers did in the Wild West with their revolvers.
Simply put, to be a good gunslinger, one needed to know who to aim at and shoot precisely. In this case, Estelle Borne only demonstrated knowing how to pull the trigger. Unfortunately for her!
Rather than pursuing her unnecessarily in court, it would have been better to force her to close her Facebook page and Twitter account for a while and make her undertake the thorough reading of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus*. She would have learned a new conception of language and its learning.
The transition from the conception of language as an image to that of language considered as social praxis, subject to education, freedom, autonomy, responsibility, and… the ethics of personal commitment.
