Abstract
Following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the demonstrations or “public mourning” of January 11th, 2015 were heralded by many as the return of the republican sacred, the re-crystallization of a long dormant people, and the resurrection of French fraternity en vivo. However, in the saturation of these political hagiographies, a series of trenchant critiques and observations quickly sought to deconstruct the meaning and putative symbolic power of January 11th. One was struck by the homogeneity of “the people” and the ostensible absence of Arabo-Muslim voices in the somber effervescence that typified the post-Charlie ambiance. Moments of silence were mocked in the banlieue and the homage rendered to the “blasphemers” was blasphemed itself. The imperative to “be Charlie” emerged less as a totemic index of republican solidarity than a Manichean strategy which exacerbated the generally perceived “fracture française”. The result was not only a calling into question of the legitimacy of January 11th, but also a series of counter-articulations which affirmed inter alia “Je ne suis pas Charlie” or worse “Je suis Coulibaly”. January 11th also divided the French left between those who read the event as the re-enchantment of the republican sacred and the people and “liberal” missives which deemed it a simulacra of solidarity, a racist demonstration comprised of “Catholic Zombies” and “Islamophobes”. This paper examines the cleavages engendered by January 11th and its afterlives which reveal not only the fragility of the Republic as a project, but also the fragility of the political sacred that has historically girded this project. At stake is not simply the question “who is Charlie”, but rather “who are the people” and what form they can or should take in a pluralist republic plunged in the perilous entre-deux between communitarianism and the possibility of a cosmopolitan republicanism. January 11th, far from being a simple demonstration, is a metaphor, a nodal point, and a seismograph of the force and frailness of the republican sacred and its capacity to enthrall, convince, and console.
Highlights
Hagiography, Hysteria, and the Unconscious of the EventThe terrorist attacks that shook France between January 7 and January 9 were remarkable not least for their spectacular brutality and symbolic opacity, and because they confirmed looming anxieties in the hexagon concerning the severity of the much touted “fracture française”
January 11th divided the French left between those who read the event as the re-enchantment of the republican sacred and the people and “liberal” missives which deemed it a simulacra of solidarity, a racist demonstration comprised of “Catholic Zombies” and
This paper examines the cleavages engendered by January 11th and its afterlives which reveal the fragility of the Republic as a project, and the fragility of the political sacred that has historically girded this project
Summary
The terrorist attacks that shook France between January 7 and January 9 were remarkable not least for their spectacular brutality and symbolic opacity, and because they confirmed looming anxieties in the hexagon concerning the severity of the much touted “fracture française”. The sacred opposes the profane, but it exists in competition with other loci of the sacred itself: the Republic and Islam/Islamism, the “political community” and the “ethno-religious community”, blasphemers and the injured, republican transcendence and religious transcendence, the nation and its enemies, the universal and the concrete, and, Je suis Charlie and Je ne suis pas Charlie These tensions and tensors form the topography of the unconscious of the event which needs to be traced in the same manner as the Republican common good needs to be tracked. With a view to unpacking and mapping the unconscious of the event, this article traces and problematizes the machinations of the dialectic of the sacred and the profane as evinced in the ritualizations of civil religion on January 11th, the discourses and actors who strained to give them meaning, and those voices who were excluded from the latter constellations or who refused to participate tout court. Futures”, asking, “what ”, and questioning whether French Republicanism can endure as a comprehensive and normative political framework, when its comprehensiveness is called into question within the fiery interstices of the sacred and the profane
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