Once again, I must pay tribute to my students from the IUT of Nice Sophia-Antipolis. It was they who provided me with the idea for this week’s Editorial. Without them, too busy with lectures and consultations, it would never have occurred to me to broach this question that touches, from afar, on philosophy and politics. A question, however, at the heart of a presentation in their subject “Communication and Psycho-sociology,” on which they wished to question me: “Can everything be said?”
How can we not freely associate with this theme, the analyst’s office, where one of the fundamental rules is to invite the analysand to say everything that comes to their mind, without any restriction? Certainly, the patient, to quote Jacques Lacan, “always tells the truth, but not the whole truth”: it’s his “half-saying” that necessitates the psychoanalyst’s third ear. The Christian ritual of confessionals and philanthropic clubs exclusively reserved for their members can also illustrate these places of speech, apparently “liberated.” A cruel realism, however, imposes itself: in confession, the believer selects his sins based on his reading grid of the church’s interdiction canons. As for the third example, personal stakes of power often distort their laudable humanist purpose. Three examples, ultimately, of a closed space, a behind-closed-doors where the utmost secrecy reigns.
Should we, on the contrary, consider the public sphere as a dangerously mined field for free expression, the students wondered? Pamphlet writers or opera librettists have always skillfully confronted state censorship: the former by circumventing it with ingenious metaphors, subtle allegories, the latter by transferring their unutterable thoughts onto the notes of music, cadences and tonalities. Sublime magic of the word where Voltaire can praise Newton’s grand funerals only to better mock Descartes’ indecent burial on the sly, in the cemetery of unbaptized dead children in Stockholm. And Mozart build with Da Ponte a “Nozze di Figaro” that defies the ban issued by Emperor Joseph II to copy Beaumarchais’ play, which aspires to celebrate, both humanly and politically, equality between men and women!
Was this freedom of expression, the dear blond heads continued, now threatened? Could respect for form constrain, limit expression in essence? The brave little ones! Not devoid of a certain relevance—ranging from resignations from the JDD to Stéphane Guillon’s sultry chronicles, and including Eric Zemmour’s disturbing remarks—their questions probably targeted the new forms of censorship, those with definitions as extensive as they are vague, based on propriety and the imperatives of social peace.
Trapped in its expression between prohibition and self-censorship, political discourse has reduced itself to the magic formula without, dare we say, the magical effects of the formula. As a consequence of its impossibility—or its refusal—to act on reality, it has become what Manuel Valls, the Deputy Mayor of Évry, denounces in his own camp: a purely “incantatory” speech, reminiscent of Martine Aubry’s hollow improvisation on the evening of the regional elections, while the foreign press, from “Die Welt” to “The Guardian,” also sees in the UMP’s defeat the “end of the magical effects” of Sarkozy’s discourse.
By privileging the normative model and in the name of ideals it seeks all the more to immobilize as the latter escape this confinement, the vocabulary of the political decision-maker has transformed, to extend the concept of “verbal Malthusianism” pronounced by Roland Barthes on the French, into a “sacred idiom” with universal and disembodied pretensions. By being confined to its “necessary and sufficient point,” political discourse resembles the academic French of the 18th century, removed from its base, separated from its “social extent.” By cutting itself off from realities, political language has also become fictitious.
