Through a Mirror, Darkly
In a world turned upside down, the false is a moment of the true, according to Guy Debord. In a genuinely inverted world, the true and the false give rise to vertiginous and deleterious mirror games.
In a text dated March 19, the Jewish decolonial collective Tsedek! put out one of the only audible responses to the accusation of antisemitism leveled at the LFI movement resulting from the so-called antisemitic nature of a visual intended for circulation on social networks, depicting the face of TV host Cyril Hanouna and calling for a march on March 22 against “the far right, its ideas… and its representatives!” The argument put forward by Tsedek! emphasizes that accusations of antisemitism against LFI are part of a broader context of suspicion, tirelessly repeated on the grounds that the movement has spoken out against an Islamophobic trend in France and that it is committed to the Palestinian people, a commitment also being subjected to unprecedented forms of repression and criminalization.1 Tsedek! also points out that the visual in question was produced by a political group whose commitment to the anti-racist and anti-fascist fight against all forms of discrimination makes it difficult to equate it with an antisemitic ideology. In this particular instance, the visual was intended to call for a march against the extreme right and racism, making it absurd to claim its antisemitic intent: “Antisemitism is never simply a matter of pencil strokes, but is first and foremost the result of concrete policies and discourses, as well as the effects of these discourses on the social body.”
But here’s the thing: If Tsedek!’s text calls for a materialistic reading, consisting of resituating the “pencil strokes” in a chain of material consequences, we need to consider this chain in its entirety and ask ourselves what is the cause that not only makes antisemitism read, heard, and seen everywhere, but also makes those who claim to denounce it adopt its language. It is essential, as Tsedek! argues, to identify antisemitic tropes by understanding “their context of enunciation.” But we also need to analyze what we might describe as the episteme of their emergence. It’s a whole grammar that permeates our culture and our discourse, making antisemitic tropes and images “floating signifiers”2 capable of attaching themselves to new signifieds without having lost any of their original harmfulness precisely because they function, as in the language of dreams, by displacement and projection.
We need to deepen our materialist reading of discourse by deciphering this very French cultural unconscious, starting with the topos of the constitutive innocence of a “left-wing people” which, in Mélenchon’s mouth, has sometimes flirted with historical revisionism.
In response to the accusation of having knowingly mobilized antisemitic imagery, LFI executives and activists have sometimes conceded an “error,” a “lapse”3 and formulated timid apologies — notably within their parliamentary group — or issued a scathing denial to their detractors, following the example of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the LFI movement. In a lengthy speech delivered at a rally in Brest on March 19, the same day Tsedek! published its text, Mélenchon said that LFI was collectively responsible for this visual (“We’re a team”). Although acknowledged by some, the error of having produced, endorsed and circulated this image, according to Mélenchon, has no identifiable author or agent, and the ultimate responsibility — an astonishing argument for such a large movement — lies with a collective collectively duped by the artificial intelligence of Elon Musk’s Grok, his AI software. We’d be dealing not just with “floating signifiers,” but with a “floating intentionality” attributable to the stereotypes and political bias of a non-human intelligence, albeit an antisemitic one, the fruit of all that humans think, write, create and dream. In short, we are dealing with the ultimate stage of what Reza Zia-Ebrahimi describes as a rearrangement of antisemitic and Islamophobic discourse,4 this time through AI.
The depth of the problem of “floating signifiers” mobilized by an agent who has himself become floating also became apparent to listeners of Mélenchon’s speech, when his charge against the journalists who accused him of antisemitism was mimetically transformed into an inverted mirror of conspiracy antisemitism. For, in order to defend himself from being antisemitic, Mélenchon first attacked the far-right ancestry of mainstream journalists, and then went on to talk about the monopolistic reign of the capitalist media, 90% of which are owned by nine billionaires… Nazis, because they themselves are driven by the unavowable desire to exterminate the innocent French “left-wing people”:
“Look at the vice of these people, ‘Yes, maybe there’s a reference…’ Meanwhile, they’re completely obsessed, at home they have the collection of extreme right-wing posters left to them by their grandparents, they look at them every five minutes. ‘Oh, that one I recognize!’ Bad luck, we don’t have these posters, we don’t know about them, we don’t know! […]
“And they think we believe them! […] They believe that the French people don’t know that 90% of the media are owned by nine billionaires […] and they believe that you are so limited in your ability to understand that you don’t ask why these people agree to lose money to own newspapers that make them nothing, while the rest of the time they’d cut your hair to make quilts if they could.”5
For the leader of a left-wing movement, a sense of political responsibility would require something other than the argument of ignorance on the part of younger generations of activists. We need to deepen our materialist reading of discourse by deciphering this very French cultural unconscious, starting with the topos of the constitutive innocence of a “left-wing people” which, in Mélenchon’s mouth, has sometimes flirted with historical revisionism.6 Conspiracist antisemitism has often been referred to as the “socialism of fools.” In the inverted mirror of our upside-down world, legitimate criticism of the capitalist attack against any form or even possibility of public truth is now constantly liable to tip over into antisemitism, sometimes projected in a paranoid mode, sometimes quite real, as in the symmetrically paranoid discourse of the American right analyzed by Naomi Klein in Doppelganger.
It is no longer antisemitism that is racism, but anti-racism that has become antisemitism.
How does a declared anti-racist movement like LFI manage to reactivate the springs of antisemitic language? In our opinion, this is the worrying question that Tsedek! does not examine to the end. Tsedek! is right to conclude with a variation on the Zen proverb, “When a wise man points at the moon the fool examines the finger,” calling on us not to “mistake molts for poisonous snakes.” Yet the dead skins of past discourses and images still contain a venom that poisons the words, images and gazes of our present. We all speak the language of antisemitism, and we recognize it because it informs not only our political consciousness but also our cultural unconscious.
In a reality that seems to have become a permanent caricature, we don’t really care whether Mélenchon’s ambiguous phrases or his way of reducing Judaism to a retrograde religion are calculated,7 or simply the result of unconscious stupidity: these slips allow the detractors of the left to send the leader of the so-called “extreme” left back-to-back with those of the extreme right, whose antisemitic and Islamophobic intentions are clear. This is all the more the case given that, while the photo of Hanouna reworked by AI may not be antisemitic in intent — as evidenced by the fact that LFI had planned other visuals based on the same model, depicting, for example, Pascal Praud, another far-right radio and TV host who is just as virulent as Hanouna, but not Jewish — the process of delivering the faces of celebrities to public vindictiveness is indeed the language of fascism. Fascism is a language.
Faced with a convergence between interests and actions that could even be called a “conspiracy” between capital and a globalized far-right whose Islamophobia justifies the equally real genocide in Palestine, we will look in vain for the smoking gun of the antisemite. The wise man in the mirror’s grimacing image takes on the caricatured features of a bad stand-up politician whose language games allow fascist movements to discredit the genuinely anti-fascist and anti-racist nature of LFI and, by extension, other anti-fascist and anti-racist movements. It also allows them to discredit LFI’s denunciation of the media and, in particular, the openly racist practices and statements of Cyril Hanouna. It is no longer antisemitism that is racism, but anti-racism that has become antisemitism. By clearing themselves of any antisemitism through their support for the State of Israel, its right to defend itself, and therefore its current genocidal policy, the far-right reinforces their brutally racist policies and practices of deportation and Islamophobic stigmatization. Here, the victims remain the same: migrants, Muslims, and, indirectly but certainly, Palestinians. All of them caught in the poisonous vice of each other’s language, charged with one and a single history.
On 8 April, an LFI deputy showed photos of the faces of children killed in Gaza. The President of the Assembly forbade him to do so on the pretext that it was “prohibited to display posters.” But these photos of the faces of dead Palestinians are not “posters”; they make visible, within national political representations, people cut down in the prime of their lives, who, without representation or politics or national representation, disappear as if they had never existed.
Related articles
- See, for example, the bill to combat antisemitism in higher education, passed by the Senate on February 20 and soon to be voted on by the National Assembly. This bill is part of a wide-ranging legislative dynamic, echoing parliamentary motions in Germany, that include the bill to enshrine the fight against antisemitism (no. 3) tabled in the Senate on October 1, 2024, which lists “the fact of contesting the existence of the State of Israel by calling into question the right of the Israeli population to sovereign enjoyment, under the effective authority of a government, of a determined territory” (art. 5) as a qualifying offense, as well as the bill to combat “renewed forms of antisemitism” (n°575) tabled on November 19, 2024, which criminalizes Holocaust denial by explicitly deeming the comparison of the State of Israel with the Nazi regime as “outrageous trivialization.” [↩]
- Arnault Skornicki proposed this expression following a speech by Jean-Luc Mélenchon in 2021 which also resulted in accusations of antisemitism when he referred to the “financier” rather than the “Muslim” as a legitimate target in a structurally Islamophobic context: “We need to unite society through secularism [laicity] and the absolute refusal to demonize any religion whatsoever. No, the enemy is not the Muslim, it’s the financier!” See https://aoc.media/opinion/2021/09/27/le-financier-le-musulman-et-le-peril-des-signifiants-flottants/ [↩]
- Expressions used by Paul Vannier, executive and LFI MP. [↩]
- Antisémitisme & islamophobie. Une histoire croisée, Paris, ed. Amsterdam, 2021. [↩]
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8EO-Y6etGc. [↩]
- In 2017, for example, Mélenchon criticized Macron’s speech at the Vél d’Hiv roundup (1942) commemoration of the French state’s responsibility for the arrest and deportation of French Jews: “Vichy is not France […]. To declare that France is responsible for the Vél’ d’Hiv’ roundup is once again to cross a threshold of maximum intensity.“ [↩]
- In the purest French secularist tradition of laicity, Melenchon has the unfortunate tendency to reduce Judaism to a “religion,” a retrograde one at that, as it is allergic to progress and any form of “creolization,” like Eric Zemmour. This reduction isn’t necessarily antisemitic but it does reveal a disturbing form of willful ignorance. [↩]