PARIS LETTERS
I.
CENSORSHIP AT THE BEAUBOURG
I left the recent exhibition on "Censorship" at the Beau–
bourg considerably disappointed. Its organizing principle appeared
to be mere amalgamation ; its goal, not reflection , but complacency .
It
jumbled everything: censorship of the imaginary and censorship
of facts , censorship of texts and censorship of images (books by
Agnes Rosenstiehl and Leila Sebbar, whose writings had been con–
sidered inadvisable for very young children , sat cheek by jowl with
New Look
and
Penthouse
in the same display) , prohibitions for
children and prohibitions for adults . The assailants of censorship
adopted, on the whole, the same stance of assimilation as the censors
themselves : denunciation of tortures in Algeria is just as noble (or ig–
noble) as pornography. One was forced to conclude that the past was
an ocean of obscurantism and that we should congratulate ourselves
on our narrow escape . Exalted sentences enticed the spectator to
self-congratulation .
Liberty can never be stifled:
Diderot.
In spite
of
the In–
quisition, the earth turns:
Galileo. The exhibition catalogue let the cat
out of the bag: according to Robert Badinter, former socialist
minister of justice and author of the preface , censorship is always,
and uniquely , "the expression of intolerance and fear ," the battle of
"the lover of order and uniformity" against "thought"; long live "the
tolerance which grants to the Other's thought its full freedom ."
The same debauchery of noble sentiments and dubious amal–
gamations already had occurred in the spring of 1987 , on the occa–
sion of the "Pasqua exhibition ," dedicated to violence and pornog–
raphy (named so after the minister of internal affairs at that time,
who belonged to the Right) . The newspaper
Liberation
had taken ad–
vantage of the event to inform us that our essential civil liberties
were threatened. Fortunately, in 1857 the censor condemned
Les
Fleurs du mal:
this proves the injustice of today's interdiction imposed
on
L 'icho des savanes,
suggested D. Filipacchi, whose company
publishes that pornographic magazine and several others like it : al–
though what they have in common with Baudelaire is not genius ,
but misogyny . The vice president of the same company , F. Tenot,
goes even further: to prosecute pornographers today is like hunting
down Jews yesterday (Pasqua reminds him of Darquier de Pelle-
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