Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2023.2185421
J. Beaman, A. Mondon
Abstract This essay frames Islamo-gauchisme as a moral panic and discusses how, why, and when it emerged as such in France, its relationship with critical race theory (a moral panic in the U.S.), and the broader societal implications of Islamo-gauchisme as a moral panic. More precisely, we discuss how and why Islamo-gauchisme entered the zeitgeist and why this moral panic is so dangerous. We demonstrate that this reinforces the colorblind hegemonic understanding of racism in France which allows for the entrenchment of racializing practices under the guise of progressive concepts. In what follows, we unpack the emergence and use of the term Islamo-gauchisme, and its relation to the denial of race and racism within France, the consolidation of the reactionary French republic, and why Islamo-gauchisme as a particular moral panic is so important.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2023.2221087
Hassanaly Ladha, R. Célestin, E. Dalmolin
The articles in this volume critique the representational systems radically demarcating “Islam” and “France”; mutually, the pieces aim at a “recognition” [Anerkennen] of the innate capacity of the subjects implicated in the dialectic of French exceptionalism to free themselves from static particularity and share in the concrete dynamism of ethical life. Our collection opens with a vigorous challenge to the premise of this volume. Questioning from the outset the terms of the debate on the relation of Islam and secularism in France, Elisabeth Roudinesco, in a spirited exchange with Christine Fizser, rejects the notion that particularity in all its forms—including “ostentatious” religious signs—can be taken as a basis for universality. True enough, abstract conceptions of citizenship and universality must find particular and concrete expression: the uniqueness of “French” “laicit e,” after all, necessarily consists in its historical specificity. Its inherited forms, moreover, cannot easily be displaced or preserved intact: they resist and remain subjects of performative resignification. Acknowledging and giving primacy to the given forms of the secular order, Roudinesco argues that the discourse on and expressions of Islam in France must be engaged in the unique context of the “French exception.” She thus rejects new terms from the left like “Islamophobia” in favor of more normative concepts like “racism” and those from the right like “Islamogauchisme” in favor of the traditional defense of free intellectual exchange. It could be asked whether there is a false equivalence here: “Islamophobia” refers to a well-documented phenomenon in France, while “Islamogauchisme,” many argue, names a non-existent conspiracy. At the same time, the latter term marks a quintessential articulation of the universalist order. Critical analysis reveals the term’s performative function: to conjure and stoke fear of a racialized specter in the service of the autochthonous tendencies Roudinesco clearly despises. “Islamo-gauchisme” in this respect exposes the ironic structure and thus dialectical instability of the universalist concepts of French secularism and, moreover, instantiates their perversion in the service of hegemony. Given the rising tide of ethnonationalism in France, we view the deconstruction of “Islamo-gauchisme” and other such terms as an increasingly urgent task. We further defend, with Hegel, the aesthetic modality through which universality—a fundamentally revolutionary impetus in its Islamic and French forms—can find recognitive expression on earth: for freedom must emerge
{"title":"Encounters: France, Islam, and the Secular Order","authors":"Hassanaly Ladha, R. Célestin, E. Dalmolin","doi":"10.1080/17409292.2023.2221087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2023.2221087","url":null,"abstract":"The articles in this volume critique the representational systems radically demarcating “Islam” and “France”; mutually, the pieces aim at a “recognition” [Anerkennen] of the innate capacity of the subjects implicated in the dialectic of French exceptionalism to free themselves from static particularity and share in the concrete dynamism of ethical life. Our collection opens with a vigorous challenge to the premise of this volume. Questioning from the outset the terms of the debate on the relation of Islam and secularism in France, Elisabeth Roudinesco, in a spirited exchange with Christine Fizser, rejects the notion that particularity in all its forms—including “ostentatious” religious signs—can be taken as a basis for universality. True enough, abstract conceptions of citizenship and universality must find particular and concrete expression: the uniqueness of “French” “laicit e,” after all, necessarily consists in its historical specificity. Its inherited forms, moreover, cannot easily be displaced or preserved intact: they resist and remain subjects of performative resignification. Acknowledging and giving primacy to the given forms of the secular order, Roudinesco argues that the discourse on and expressions of Islam in France must be engaged in the unique context of the “French exception.” She thus rejects new terms from the left like “Islamophobia” in favor of more normative concepts like “racism” and those from the right like “Islamogauchisme” in favor of the traditional defense of free intellectual exchange. It could be asked whether there is a false equivalence here: “Islamophobia” refers to a well-documented phenomenon in France, while “Islamogauchisme,” many argue, names a non-existent conspiracy. At the same time, the latter term marks a quintessential articulation of the universalist order. Critical analysis reveals the term’s performative function: to conjure and stoke fear of a racialized specter in the service of the autochthonous tendencies Roudinesco clearly despises. “Islamo-gauchisme” in this respect exposes the ironic structure and thus dialectical instability of the universalist concepts of French secularism and, moreover, instantiates their perversion in the service of hegemony. Given the rising tide of ethnonationalism in France, we view the deconstruction of “Islamo-gauchisme” and other such terms as an increasingly urgent task. We further defend, with Hegel, the aesthetic modality through which universality—a fundamentally revolutionary impetus in its Islamic and French forms—can find recognitive expression on earth: for freedom must emerge","PeriodicalId":10546,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary French and Francophone Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49478652","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2023.2185417
A. Boubeker
Abstract Since the 1980s, the question of Islam in France has been an element of the smaller and larger fears of French society. First exploited by the countries of origin of Muslim immigrants or by mayors of suburbs wishing to use religious associations to combat delinquency, the construction of Islam in France quickly came up against a current situation made up of the successive “affairs of Islamic veil”, controversies over secularism and terrorist violence in a context of rising extreme right-wing political trends riding on concerns about security. This article delineates these disparate but related trends and events that turn “Islam in France” into a “Muslim problem” which leads to a separate, “exceptional,” legal approach to citizens of Muslim faith.
{"title":"L’Islam de France ou les Banlieues de la Laïcité","authors":"A. Boubeker","doi":"10.1080/17409292.2023.2185417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2023.2185417","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Since the 1980s, the question of Islam in France has been an element of the smaller and larger fears of French society. First exploited by the countries of origin of Muslim immigrants or by mayors of suburbs wishing to use religious associations to combat delinquency, the construction of Islam in France quickly came up against a current situation made up of the successive “affairs of Islamic veil”, controversies over secularism and terrorist violence in a context of rising extreme right-wing political trends riding on concerns about security. This article delineates these disparate but related trends and events that turn “Islam in France” into a “Muslim problem” which leads to a separate, “exceptional,” legal approach to citizens of Muslim faith.","PeriodicalId":10546,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary French and Francophone Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49563311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2023.2185427
Emilio Spadola
Abstract While historical and anthropological critiques of secularism have illuminated its contradictory claims, they have been less attentive to secularism’s rhetorical force, i.e., its performative effect. Before theorizing the rhetoric of “Islamo-Gauchisme” and contemporary secularism more broadly, then, this article first traces this inattention to an influential line of argument grounded in anthropologist Talal Asad’s critiques of religion and secularism (1993, 2003, 2018), which opposes secularism’s (putatively) transparent and referential language and autonomous subject, derived from Protestantism, to the performative, pedagogical discourse and subject of authoritative traditions of pious discipline, medieval Christianity and contemporary Islam, in particular. Next, the article lays the ground for theorization by foregrounding the performative and citational, or “theatro-graphic” (Weber 2001), qualities of secular rhetoric in Walter Benjamin’s (2019) and Paul de Man’s (1983) treatments of Baroque and pre-romantic allegory. It closes by reading the performative force of accusation and allegory in the avowedly secular (laïc) rhetoric of contemporary French politics.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2023.2185398
Christine Fizser, É. Roudinesco
Christine Fizser : Compte-tenu de la richesse de votre livre, Soi-même comme un roi. Essai sur les d erives identitaires (Seuil 2021), on choisit de partir du chapitre V, ce qui ne vous d eplâıt pas parce qu’on y trouve l’attentat de Charlie Hebdo. Le chapitre V s’achevant comme une proposition vers autre chose, sur : « Il est vain de pr etendre se d ebarrasser d’un modele de citoyennet e abstraite au nom de la valorisation des particularit es. Il est aussi vain de pr etendre cela que d’ eriger ces particularit es en mod eles d’universalit e » lorsque vous citez L evi-Strauss. Le th eme de ce num ero de Contemporary French & Francophone Studies/SITES semble prendre comme allant de soi un rapport entre ce qu’on a appel e « l’islamogauchisme », et la laïcit e. Est-ce que vous pensez que cette mani ere de voir est juste ? Elisabeth Roudinesco : Non. Et je le dis dans tout le livre. Je rappelle que j’ai sign e et que j’ai ecrit des articles pour d efendre le mod ele français de la laïcit e en France, c’est a dire, par exemple, l’interdiction du voile a l’ ecole. C’est unique en France, je le dis dans le livre, c’esta-dire que, dans la fonction publique, j’approuve l’interdiction des signes ostentatoires religieux parce que nous le devons ; nous ne sommes pas anglais, nous n’avons pas de roi, nous ne sommes pas anglais et nous n’avons pas un fond religieux, ce pas notre mod ele. Alors je suis pour la pr eservation de notre mod ele. Notamment en ce qui concerne les mineurs, et naturellement toute la fonction publique, je suis favorable a l’interdiction du voile int egral dans l’espace public, mais pas plus. Je pense qu’ a l’Universit e par exemple, ce sont des filles majeures, et que l’on ne peut pas empêcher le voile dans les amphith eâtres. Mais on a un arsenal de droits qui nous permet d’interdire le voile int egral parce qu’en d emocratie, on doit voir le visage. Sur le sujet, je pense qu’on ne doit pas c eder. Alors maintenant, le mot islamo-gauchisme, même le mot islamophobie, je ne l’emploie pas, parce que je n’emploie pas non plus jud eophobie. Je pense qu’antis emitisme c’est tr es clair. On parle d esormais de racisme et d’antis emitisme. Être hostile aux religions en soi ? D es lors qu’il n’y a pas
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Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2023.2185422
R. Achi
Abstract In the French collective imagination, Islam is the object of a triple representation. This religion is said to be the last to have been established on French territory through migratory flows from the former colonial empire, the most unsuited to the secularized context of French society, and the most alien to the French law of worship resulting from the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State. This article proposes to go beyond this representation and to put it into historical perspective. More precisely, it aims to deconstruct it, particularly from the point of view of Algeria, by looking back at the colonial genesis of a cliché that has undoubtedly left its mark: the impossibility of placing Islam under the liberal auspices of the French system of cults because of a presumed incompatibility, behind which there loomed above all the fear that Muslims would use it in a roundabout, anti-colonial manner. In return, some of them proved to be the guardians of this right in the face of structural intrusions of the state in Muslim affairs.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2023.2221080
Hassanaly Ladha
ed from the speculative impulse of thought and corresponding contingency of the real. The encounter with the colonizer dialectically interpellates the colonized, animating her “signs” of resistance. Revealing through their dynamic alterity, real or imagined, the dialectical instability and thus revolutionary impetus internal to the Enlightenment and its secular legacy, Muslims in the colonial period and in the West today mark precisely what “secularism” cannot acknowledge as inherent in its system: the fundamental sublimity and violent articulation of its signifying regimes. Dogmas of the “understanding”—prescribing, for instance, the liberation of the Muslim woman through laïcit e—mystify that sublimity and violence, repressing knowledge of the always latent potential and actuality of fanaticism and terror by the European state since the French Revolution. As Fanon points out, “fanaticism” and “terror” can be attributed far more aptly to European coloniality than to decolonial insurgency: as examples, Fanon cites the elision of the distinction between the white civilian and military sectors in Algeria; the license granted to the entire settler population—numbering hundreds of thousands—to kill Muslims with impunity; and the systematic torture, rape, and murder of Algerian women. The resulting “terror” consumes colonial society: [The French state decrees that] henceforth all Europeans will be armed and should fire on anyone who appears suspect. The savage, iniquitous repression bordering on genocide must above all be prosecuted by the authorities, according to general opinion. Lacoste [the governor-general] replies: Let us systematize the repression, let us organize a manhunt for Algerians. And symbolically he gives civilian powers to the military, and military powers to the civilians. The circle is closed. In the middle is the Algerian, disarmed, starved, hunted, jostled, beaten, lynched, soon to be shot as a suspect. Today, in Algeria, there is not a single Frenchman who is not authorized or welcome to use his weapon [to kill], who does not have permission or the obligation to find, provoke, and pursue suspects. The unblinking and, for Hegel, ultimately “religious” fanaticism of such programmatic terror in the name of “freedom”—continuous with Robespierre— initially intensifies when confronted with the sublime disarticulation of the colonial dialectic. In this vein, the “terror” unleashed by the state gives rise to “terrorism,” even if in relatively meeker forms, on the part of the colonized as a dialectically inevitable response. As the distinction between European and Muslim appear and disappear through the endless “grand battle” of signification, the evidently contingent and arbitrary “limits” of the colonial project continue to dissipate: The adversary now knew, as certain militant women had spoken under torture, that women with a very Europeanized aspect were playing a fundamental role in the battle. Moreover, certain European women of Alg
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Pub Date : 2023-03-15DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2023.2185418
Hamza Esmili
Abstract This article asserts that the main polarity that structures the controversy around Islam and its followers in France is the one that opposes the proponents of the liberal motive—that is to say, of a strictly individualistic perspective that does not consider the historical links constituted within the society—to those of the conservative motive—which postulate the strong thesis of the existence of a coordinated conspiracy of the Muslims. The main point of contention is thus the qualification of the main point of contention is the characterization of collective experiences in modern society, denied by some and reified by others. The shift from the fight against radicalization to the anti-separatism apparatus can be understood as the passage from a liberal moment—discursively based on the repression of deviant individuals—to an ongoing conservative one where the Muslim community is explicitly incriminated as an inadequacy within the liberal and secular society.
{"title":"La Possibilité d’un Complot","authors":"Hamza Esmili","doi":"10.1080/17409292.2023.2185418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2023.2185418","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article asserts that the main polarity that structures the controversy around Islam and its followers in France is the one that opposes the proponents of the liberal motive—that is to say, of a strictly individualistic perspective that does not consider the historical links constituted within the society—to those of the conservative motive—which postulate the strong thesis of the existence of a coordinated conspiracy of the Muslims. The main point of contention is thus the qualification of the main point of contention is the characterization of collective experiences in modern society, denied by some and reified by others. The shift from the fight against radicalization to the anti-separatism apparatus can be understood as the passage from a liberal moment—discursively based on the repression of deviant individuals—to an ongoing conservative one where the Muslim community is explicitly incriminated as an inadequacy within the liberal and secular society.","PeriodicalId":10546,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary French and Francophone Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45492854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2023.2152581
T. A. Perry
Abstract A common assumption in literary studies is that laughter is, if not the chief goal of humor, certainly a desirable and increasingly necessary one. Can there even be such a thing as humorless humor? I argue that upcountry language and humor are a search for home and belonging, literally as the State of Maine and, when unavailable, as a longing and expression of a certain state of mind and practice of simple living. These following stories and anecdotes make a case for a humor that gently displaces funny by FUN, using language as a universal search for home and belonging: literally when in the State of Maine, and universally as a state of mind that focusses on the humble practice of simply living a worthy human life.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2023.2152585
Derek Schilling
Abstract Raymond Queneau’s postwar reputation as comic author belies the suspicion the writer brought to a negativistic stripe of humor rooted in fin-de-siècle French cabarets and Jarry’s circle. In the polemical essay of 1938 “L’humour et ses victimes,” Queneau exposes the limitations of “perpetual humor,” which he claims must be replaced by a measured form of irony, the creative energies unleashed in Europe by Dada having long since run their course. The matrix of the Aesopic fable allows the essayist to lay bare, through the figure of gonflement, the crass self-importance of contemporary French humorists and to establish the grounds for a re-humanized space of creation wherein humor equates with wisdom, in Hegel’s sense of the end of History.
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