Jean Baudrillard - A Conjuration of Imbeciles - Liberation May 7, 1997

(Translated by Francois Debrix)

Two situations, both critical and insoluble. One is the total
worthlessness of contemporary art. The other is the impotence of the
political class in front of Le Pen. The two situations are
exchangeable, and their solutions are transferable. Indeed, the
inability to offer any political alternative to Le Pen is displaced to
the cultural terrain, to the domain where a Holy Cultural Alliance
prevails. Conversely, the problematization of contemporary art can
only come from a reactionary, irrational, or even fascist mode of
thinking.

What can we oppose to such a dignified conjuration of imbeciles?
Nothing. There is unfortunately nothing which can remedy such a
mechanism of intellectual perversion. This mechanism is based upon the
bad conscience and the total impotence of the so-called "democratic"
elites who are unable to find a solution to both impasses, that of
contemporary art and that of the political struggle against the Front
National. The elites have simply chosen to fuse the two problems
together in a single moralizing and vituperative discourse. The real
question, then, becomes whether one can still open one's mouth, utter
anything which may sound strange, irreverent, heterodoxical or
paradoxical without being automatically called a fascist (which is,
let's admit it, a way of paying tribute to fascism). Why has every
moral, conventional, or conformist discourse - traditional rightist
discourses - moved to the left?

There has been a shattering reformulation. The right used to embody
moral values and the left, by contrast, used to represent an
antagonistic mode of historical and political exigency. But today the
left is deprived of its political energy. It has become a purely
moralistic law-making structure, a representative of universal values,
a sacred holder of the reign of Virtue, and an incarnation of
antiquated values such as Good or Truth. It now acts as a jurisdiction
which asks everyone to act responsibly while still granting itself the
right to remain irresponsible. The political illusion of the left
(which had remained frozen during twenty years of opposition) turned
into a platform of historical morality (and not of historical
direction) once it came to power. It then became the holder of a
morality of truthfulness, basic rights, and good conscience, having
thus reached a zero degree on the political scale and, undoubtedly,
the lowest point of the genealogy of morals. Its moralization of all
values marked its historical failure (and the failure of thinking in
general). Since then, even reality, the principle of reality, has
become an act of faith. Try to question the reality of war, for
example, and you immediately become a betrayer of moral law.

With the left and the traditional right both deprived of political
substance, where has the political gone to? Well, simply, it has moved
to the far right. As Bruno Latour so accurately noted the other day in
Le Monde, the only political discourse today in France is that of Le
Pen's Front National. All the rest is moral and pedagogic discourse,
teachers' lessons and lecturers' tirades, managers' rhetoric and
programmers' jargon. By contrast, having given himself to evil and
immorality, Le Pen has been able to take over all of the political,
the remnant of what has been abandoned or voluntarily rejected by a
political ideology of Good deeds and Enlightenment values. The more he
is antagonized by a moral coalition (a sign of political impotence),
the more he enjoys the benefits of political immorality, the benefits
which come with being the only one on the side of evil. In the past,
whenever the traditional right decided to implement an ideology of
morality and order, you could always count on the left, always
attempting to antagonize those so-called moral values in the name of
political claims. But today, the left is experiencing the same
condition that once characterized the traditional right. Suddenly
responsible for the defense of moral order, the left has no choice but
to witness the slippage of abandoned political energies toward
political forces which do not hesitate to antagonize its newly created
order. Conversely, the left keeps on reactivating the source of evil
by continuing to embody the rule of virtue, which of course is nothing
more than the rule of supreme hypocrisy.

If Le Pen did not exist, we would have to invent him! Indeed, it is
thanks to him that we can get rid of our evil share, of what is the
worst part of us. It is as such that we can curse Le Pen. If he were
to disappear, however, we would be left begging for pity! We would be
left struggling with our own racist, sexist, and nationalist
(everyone's fate) viruses. Simply, we would be abandoned to the
murderous negativity of society. As such, Le Pen is the perfect mirror
of the political class which uses him to conjure up its own evils,
just as every individual uses the political class to cast away any
form of corruption inherent to society (both are similar types of
corrupt and cathartic functions). Trying to put an end to this, trying
to purify society and moralize public life, trying to eradicate what
claims to embody evil is a complete misunderstanding of the way evil
operates, of the way politics itself operates.

Opting for a mode of unilateral denunciation, and ignoring the very
principle of reversibility of evil, anti-Le Pen supporters have left
him with a monopolistic control over the evil share. Having thus been
cast away, Le Pen can no longer be dislodged. By demonizing him in the
name of virtue, the political class simply offers him a most
comfortable situation. Le Pen simply has to pick up and recycle the
discourse of ambivalence, of denial of evil, and of hypocrisy that his
opponents constantly throw at him in the course of their battle for
the defense of law or the defense of a good cause. Le Pen's enemies
provide him with the energy he needs. Too eager to discredit him, they
simply transform his mistakes into (his own) victories. They do not
see that good never comes from a purification of evil (evil always
retaliates in a forceful way), but rather from a subtle treatment
which turns evil against itself.

All this shows us that Le Pen may be the embodiment of worthlessness
and idiocy. No doubt! But he is above all the symptom of his
opponents' stupidity. The imbeciles are those who, by denouncing him,
blatantly reveal their own impotence and idiocy and glaringly
demonstrate how absurd it is to antagonize him face to face. They
simply have not understood the rules of evil that his game of musical
chairs follow. By continuing to antagonize him, the imbeciles give
life to their own ghosts, their negative doubles. This shows, indeed,
a terrifying lack of lucidity on their part. But what drives such a
perverse effect, the fact that the left remains trapped in a discourse
of denunciation whereas Le Pen maintains a privilege of enunciation?
What pushes one to gain all the profits from the crime while the other
suffers the negative effects of recrimination? What causes one to "get
off" [s'eclatant] with evil when the other gets lost with the victim?

Well, it's quite simple. By incarcerating Le Pen in a ghetto, it is in
fact the democratic left which becomes incarcerated and which affirms
itself as a discriminatory power. It becomes exiled within its own
obsession and automatically grants a privilege of justice to what it
demonizes. And, of course, Le Pen never misses an opportunity to claim
republican legality and fairness on his behalf. But it is above all on
the imaginary but very pregnant figure of the rebel and persecuted
soul that he establishes his prestige. Thus, he can enjoy the
consequences of both legality and illegality. A victim of ostracism,
Le Pen has an incredible freedom of language and can deploy an
unmatched arrogance of judgement, something that the left has deprived
itself of.

Let's give an example of such a magical thought that today stands in
for political thought. Le Pen is blamed for the sentiment of rejection
and exclusion of immigrants in France. But this is just a drop in an
ocean of social exclusion that has overwhelmed all of society
(recently, exclusion itself, as well as the "social breakdown" that
politicians like to mention, were all excluded by the decree signed by
the President of the Republic to dissolve the National Assembly). We
are all both responsible and victim at the same time of this
inextricable and complex process of exclusion. There is something
typically magical in the need to conjure up this virus, which is
everywhere to be found (it is a direct function of our social and
technical "progress"), and in the desire to exorcise the curse of
exclusion (and our impotence by the same token) through the figure of
a hated man, institution, or organization, no matter who or what they
are. It is as if we were faced with a tumor in need of extraction
whereas, in fact, the metastases have already expanded everywhere. The
Front National simply follows the course of the social metastases, and
is all the more virulent since people think that they have eradicated
the disease when, in fact, it has already infected the entire body.
Not to mention that this process of magical projection of the Front
National takes place along the same lines as this party's own process
of demonization of immigrants. One must always be suspicious of the
ruse of contamination, a ruse which, by means of the transparency of
evil, mutates positivity into negativity, and a demand for liberty
into "democratic despotism." As usual, it is a question of
reversibility, of a subtle encirclement of evil whose rational
intelligence is never suspected. While modern pathology tells us a lot
about the physical body, we do not pay attention to this mode of
analysis when it comes to the social body.

To remain within the political, we must step away from ideology and
look at things through the lens of social physics. Our democratic
society is a stasis. Le Pen is a metastasis. Global society is dying
of inertia and immune deficiency. Le Pen is simply the visible
transcription of such a viral condition; he is the spectacular
projection of the virus. This happens in dreams too. Le Pen is a
burlesque, hallucinatory figuration of a latent state, of a silent
inertia caused by forced integration and systematic exclusion. Since
the hope of finally curing social inequalities has truly disappeared
(by and large), it is no surprise if resentment has moved to the level
of racial inequality. The failure of the social explains the success
of the racial (and of all the other fatal strategies). As such, Le Pen
is the only savage analyst in today's society. The fact that he is
placed on the far right is merely the sad result of the fact that
analysts are no longer to be found on the left or the far left.
Judges, intellectuals no longer analyze. Only the immigrants perhaps,
as polar opposites, could become analysts too. But they already have
been recycled by a good and responsible humanitarian thought. Le Pen
is the only one who operates a radical erasure of the so-called
distinction between right and left. This is, no doubt, an erasure by
default. But the harsh criticism of this conventional distinction
which was unleashed in the 1960s (and culminated in 1968) has
unfortunately disappeared from the political scene today. Le Pen
simply recuperates a de facto situation that the political class
refuses to confront (it even uses elections to deny it), but whose
extreme consequences will be felt some day. If, one day, political
imagination, political will, and political demand hope to rebound,
they will have to take into account the radical abolition of the
antiquated and artificial distinction between right and left, which,
in fact, has been largely damaged and compromised over the past
decades, and which only holds today through some sort of complicit
corruption on both sides. This distinction is dead in practice but, by
means of an incurable revisionism, is constantly reaffirmed. Thus, Le
Pen is the only one who makes up the new political scene, as if
everyone else had already agreed to destroy what's left of democracy,
perhaps to produce the retrospective illusion that it actually used to
mean something.

What consequences of this extreme (but original) situation can we
envisage if we do not focus on the hallucinatory medium that Le Pen
embodies, if we do not take into account the point of magical
conjuration where all energies converge and vanish? How can we avoid
falling for the viral growth of our own ghosts if we fail to take into
account, beyond moral order and democratic revisionism, the type of
savage analysis that Le Pen and the Front National have, to some
extent, taken from us?

Baudrillard, Jean. "A Conjuration of Imbeciles." Liberation May 7,