1. FREE SPEECH FROM SUBJECTIVE “PROPERTY” TO “EQUAL LIBERTY”
1.1. Freedom of expression must be considered in an extended sense that includes not only diverse means of expression but the complete situations of communication subjected to conflictual relations of power in a “globalized” world. These are two different extensions, but they become correlative in a public space where not only ideas, discourses, and messages, but also images, spectacles, and reports of collective events are circulating across borders through a number of old and new media.1
1.2. “Liberal” definitions and regulations of freedom of expression are conceived in terms of a “subjective right” of the person whose model is private property: hence, regulations are conceived as “limitations” imposed before or after the event to avoid detrimental effects on others’ rights. As John Stuart Mill famously stated (On Liberty, 1859): “an opinion only carries intrinsic value to the owner of that opinion, thus silencing the expression of that opinion is an injustice to a basic human right.”2
1.3. A more adequate model must rely on the representation of speech and expression as a dialogical process including a reciprocity of effects and an anticipated response to “speech acts” which is preserved or destroyed: hence it will be conceived as a public good, combining “equal liberties,” that a democratic constitution ought to collectively maximize. What forms the public good is not only the result of free speech, but its exercise. This arises both from the “ontological” evidence that opinions (in the generic sense) do not precede their expression in the public, but result from dialogue, interaction, “differends” (in Lyotard’s sense), “excitation” (in Butler’s sense), and from the imperative to incorporate the society’s powers into its political constitution in a constructive manner, where each individual is empowered when the response of others is accepted as a condition of her own autonomy. Monopolistic, oligarchic or one-sided “appropriation” of the exercise of free speech and the power of expression therefore is not only a contingent limitation of the freedom of expression, but a destruction of its content.3
2. TERROR EFFECTS IN THE SPACE OF IMPERFECT COMMUNICATION
2.1. The “regulating idea” of perfect communication or “ideal speech situation” (Habermas) where freedom of speech would be “normative” (i.e., either natural or imposed) must be inverted.4 The real conditions of “unconditional” democratic exercise of free speech concern the radical transformation of the always already existing situation of “imperfect communication” that is saturated with violence and where terror effects are virtually possible, or become actual.
2.2. It is true, but insufficient, to explain that the social “classes” that own wealth, economic, cultural, and geopolitical power also control (i.e., monopolize) to a greater or lesser extent the possibilities of legitimate “expression,” hence tend to privatize the “public good” of free speech.
2.2.1. Why? Because one has to account for the exclusionary effect inherent in the “codes” of dominant discourses, invalidating “subaltern” discourses and preventing their voicing in the public space. This is the structural discursive violence: the “subaltern cannot speak” (Spivak) and who cannot speak is/remains a “subaltern” in the constituency.
2.2.2. Structural discursive violence randomly generates different reactions: resistance, claims of the repressed voices (protests, laments), or counterviolence (discursive and nondiscursive), therefore performative displacement or mimetism. A violent reaction to violence is also a limit form of expression which may represent the only possibility for oppressed groups (e.g., colonized peoples, the “wretched of the earth” defined by Fanon) or “minorities” to be heard and impose recognition of their rights. Whether it is or becomes self-destructive is perhaps the most difficult political issue, which depends both on a correlation of forces and on ethical orientations of the group.
2.3. It is true that structural discursive violence relegates more or less completely many citizens (perhaps the majority) outside of “citizenship” in the active sense, but this is insufficient: it also deprives the society of the possibility to know its own constitution, thus extending a veil of ignorance over the constituency.5
2.3.1. This is true for the “dominants” as well, who tend to justify this ignorance in terms of “universalistic” discourses. A negative characteristic of universalism is therefore its tendency to suppress its own historical conditions, establishing self-referentiality instead of self-reflection or self-criticism. When conceived not as a political construction of the citizens themselves, in their intrinsic plurality, but as an absolute, universalism denies its own limits and resistances, therefore it doesn’t know itself.
2.3.2. “Acts of terrorism” and “counterterrorism” are essentially aiming at suppressing every possibility of a “feedback” or “response” that is not mimetic to a first interpellation: therefore, they involve censorship and self-censorship. But the “threat” would not be effective if the “veil of ignorance” did not blind everyone with respect to the identity and the position of her “others,” hence herself.
2.4. The political objective of establishing the conditions of the unconditional freedom is not simply to create a constitutional framework for the freedom of expression, but to listen to the suppressed or distorted voices, make room for their conflictual, even provoking utterance, and lift the veil of ignorance: in other words, cross and displace every boundary that limited the reciprocity of interpellations. To invent or implement the conditions of the unconditional is politics as such.
3. “BLASPHEMY,” “INSULT,” AND THE METASTASES OF THE SACRED
3.1. The Charlie Hebdo affair, with its multiple contexts, retroactively appears as a multiplier of terror effects, which powerfully contributed to framing perceptions and discourses, before they were “captured” by war.6
3.2. On one side, there is need to discuss the claim by authors and publishers of the cartoons that they were uttering a sign of “equality” toward the Muslim citizens.7 The subtext of this claim is the enactment of a typical discursive violence also illustrated by injunctions to Muslim citizens to publicly “disavow” terrorism if they wanted to be assimilated to the majority and considered “compatriots”. They were reduced to silence through the double bind of accepting a negative (criminal) image of their identity or distancing themselves from their own “religion.”
3.3. On the other hand, there is need to discuss the claim by Muslim voices that the outrage at the cartoons had nothing to do with blasphemy but was linked to a feeling of collective insult or injury wounding the “community.”8 This seems to be true and untrue.
3.3.1. There is massive use of the category “blasphemy” in Islamic countries (such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and more recently Indonesia) subjected to the influence of fundamentalist interpretations of the shari’a and using tribunals against atheists, or men and women belonging to religious minorities deemed unrespectful of the Koran. On their side, “secularist” discourses use blasphemy as a projective category to imaginarily penetrate the theologico-political space of the “Muslim world” without engaging with it, while remaining protected in the “Western secular” space and claiming its state protection; they tend to erect themselves as proud “blasphemers.”
3.3.2. Behind the question of “blasphemy” there really lies the question of the importance of sacred values, institutions, and words that exist in every society to various degrees, either in religious or secular forms (the latter, essentially national), or a combination of both. The same speakers who denounce the repressive effects of the sacred in non-Western societies are blind or biased when it comes to the repressive effects of the sacred in Western democratic societies.
3.3.3. The mimetic response of Islamic fundamentalism (and a fortiori, terrorism) to Western secular (republican) Islamophobia also played on the “confusion” of religious symbolism (the sacred) that is inherited as a shared tradition, with an “organic” unity or solidarity of the believers, by trying to revive an archaic concept of the ummah: “insulting the honor” of the Prophet, forcing Muslim women to take off their veils, which are part of their personal identity, are presented as physical injuries inflicted on a collective “body.”
3.4. Muslims and non-Muslims alike are thus caught in the production of an “Islamic identity” that relies on projections based on fear, hatred, and above all, ignorance: to “deconstruct” these mechanisms is the task of “intellectuals” of different sides, trying to make free speech possible, hence real. Admittedly, their most pressing obligations regard the criticism of ideologies that are dominant in the community/constituency with which they have closer material and moral ties, or to which they “belong.”
4. BORDERS INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE COMMON PLACE
4.1. To decide that certain peoples, bearing a certain “civilization,” are essentially incapable of cultivating freedom of speech or expression because of their history and their collective psychology, is a typical form of orientalism, most of the time inherited from colonialism, and participating in the construction of contemporary racism.
4.1.1. A corollary of this prejudice is the self-legitimizing idea that freedom of expression is per se a Western democratic “value” which is inherent in the institutions of the liberal state (authoritarian or totalitarian regimes forming a regrettable exception). This can be pushed quite easily to the idea that freedom of expression is threatened from outside more than inside the liberal state. Hence it should be imposed outside by whichever means to remain protected inside.
4.1.2. A symmetric corollary is inverted orientalism: the idea that freedom of expression is a Western democratic “value” which is inherent in the imperialist domination and Eurocentric hegemony. This can be pushed quite easily to the idea that freedom of expression is a weapon to disintegrate non-European societies and cultures, therefore it should be resisted and fought against in order to protect vital collective traditions.
4.1.3. Taken together, orientalist and inverted orientalist discourses define the great imaginary border (“faultline,” in Huntingtonian jargon) that dramatizes the political confrontations of the global world, making each side of the border, as it is projected on the maps, an object of hatred and fear.
4.2. Whereas the modern Eurocentric “Nomos” of the Earth, in terms of communications as well as political institutions, was based on a primacy of national and imperial borders, the “Nomos” of Globalization coincides with the expansion of electronic communication, seemingly borderless, which relativizes territorial borders and becomes intertwined with the circulation of commodities and labor power in a single market. News and values are themselves distributed like commodities, and the same financial power that displaces humans also controls their access to knowledge. This is the universal space where freedom of expression must now define its regime.9
4.2.1. Universality, however, is not homogeneity. The “liquidity” (Baumann) of the global communications across boundaries and the “ubiquity” of its network (reaching individuals anywhere on the planet and gathering them into virtual communities), is perfectly compatible with different kinds of “internal borders,” which produce new partitions of the planetary public space, or reproduce old ones to sustain monopolistic and oligarchic regimes of power. There is a (dis)location of power. Among these differences is, tendentially, the distinction of conservative societies (e.g., authoritarian, patriarchic and paternalistic, theocratic—or a combination of these), where it is mainly a deviant opinion or conduct that is censored and punished (as sacrilegious, immoral, unruly), and liberal societies (combining freedom of circulation and freedom of opinion), where it is mainly otherness, alienness, “minority” status that is discriminated against and silenced, sometimes eliminated. Dominations locally and globally obey different patterns, resistances as well, even if they “resonate” or become dissonant. 10
4.2.2. Visible censorship of media and interdiction of blasphemy, or invisible monitoring and gathering of personal and collective data, are two different forms of “police” restricting expression, which follow different anthropological models and use different techniques. Although they don’t add up in a logical manner, they can overlap. It is their concrete combination in a specific moment and place (Erdogan’s Turkey, Obama’s America) that defines the degree of freedom and equality available for individuals and groups in a given society. It is hardly possible to hierarchize societies, countries and civilizations after such criteria, especially in the long term, but it is certainly the case that one may have to choose between them in the present, sometimes as a matter of life and death. Think of Salman Rushdie and Edgar Snowden.
4.3. To maximize freedom of expression in a common globalized world (or simply to create such a world), it is necessary to transgress or suppress certain boundaries, and to radically “democratize” others, i.e., make them more permeable and more symmetrical (which means less discriminatory), and an object of discussion and negotiation among those who “share” them. What is true for the mobility of persons (“migrations”) must be true for the mobility of ideas and discourses as well (“translations”).
4.3.1. An “international law of nations” in the global age must take the intensification and the democratization of communication as simultaneous, if not identical, concerns. It must define communication and expression as public goods, a common resource of humankind as such, which needs to be secured and developed. That includes education (e.g., as defined by UNESCO), but also regulation of monopolies and a protection of so-called deviants and dissidents by the international community. As international organizations monitor the distribution of inequalities of income and access to vital resources, they should also monitor the unequal distribution of access to cultural resources, “symbolic capital” (Bourdieu), and means of expression.
5. SECULARISM IS FEARLESS SPEECH
5.1. Freedom of expression as a public good in the global age has national and transnational, juridical and moral (subjective) conditions. As a central institution of civic universalism (or a universality based on the agency, rights, and duties of “citizens”), it is conceptually distinct from either religious universalities or the universality of the market. It can be conflicting with their respective logics, but also try to subsume them under norms of autonomy and equality which are meaningful for different subjectivities.
5.2. Why do conflicts inevitably arise in the public sphere? Not only because “opinions” are different, not mutually “translatable,” or because class interests and other interests are incompatible, but because subjects are personally implicated in their own discourses (which “interpellate” them, or require from them attachment and fidelity, impose guilt and recognition, dignity and shame, etc.). As a consequence, subjects not only perceive and “judge” each other’s opinions, but their respective identities (histories, cultures, values, ways of life: “Gods” in Max Weber’s extended sense).
5.2.1. Religious (or antireligious) discourses and traditions are clearly a very strong apparatus of interpellation in that sense. But the media regime that corresponds to the fully developed market society paradoxically generates equally strong tendencies for individuals to identify their personality with the messages they transmit or the emotions they share. A culture acquired or inherited from the ancestors is a “human capital.” We observe today permanent combinations of both mechanisms.
5.2.2. Terror and fear are jointly intensifying the “police of thought,” or the political constraints that limit or suppress free speech. Terror is interiorized as fear, and fear is exteriorized as terror, or counterterror, or “state of exception.” Fear is terrorized and terrorizing: it is fear of others, aliens, enemies, and fear of oneself or one’s fellow citizens.
5.2.3. The opposite of fear and terror, which is fearless speech, governs both relations to others and relations to oneself. It includes “speaking truth to power” in the public (be they powers of sovereign authorities or powers of silent social norms), and critically distancing oneself from one’s identity as an exclusion of others, inside or outside the “community.” In other words, it involves a discussion of all traditions (including the modern or modernist traditions), and an awareness of the fact that the ethical value of any tradition is enhanced by universal recognition, but need not be considered an absolute.11
5.3. There is an intrinsic articulation of the idea of freedom of expression as a public good, and a generalized concept of the secular, itself “secularized,” which is precisely provided by the practice of fearless speech. Fearless speech accepts the risk of conflict, publicizing the “differend,” while opening the possibility of knowledge, and seeking the maximum knowledge of the other (even the enemy). It is therefore a strategy of civility based on the intelligence of identities, relations, and antagonisms, rather than just recognition or respect. This appears to be incompatible with any known imposition of the sacred. It therefore obliges us to disintricate the religious and the sacred. Is that possible? If it becomes real, it will have been possible.