TSVETAN TODOROV
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poix, the director of Jewish affairs in France during World War II);
both are poor, defenseless victims (it's not clear what would have
been the equivalent for the Jews of the juicy profits the editors of
these mass circulation magazines reap). Jack Lang, former socialist
minister of culture, invoked Rabelais, the Cathedral of Bourges, and
Picasso to justify the practices of the Filipacchi press (famous, as
everybody knows in France, for their initiatives on behalf of pure art
and avant-garde aesthetics!), forgetting that there might be a dis–
tinction between art and business: if
New
Look
(another porn maga–
zine) has moved these days to "softer" images, it's not in the name of
artistic integrity, but because marketing showed that such images
are more profitable.
Freedom and Power
One image, however, in the "Censorship" exhibition
prompted at least one question.
It
showed young people burning
newspapers and posters of the Organisation Armee Secrete (the ter–
rorist right-wing movement that fought for French Algeria) in a
demonstration in Paris in 1962. The strange thing is that it appeared
(as amalgamation requires) in a series of images showing burned
books, from the
auto-dajes
of the Inquisition to the public burnings
organized by the Nazis. And yet, the meaning of the first image
could not be the same as that of the others, since burning, here, was
to liberate, not to oppress. The exhibition catalogue presents,
moreover, another series of similar photographs: men in Budapest in
1956 burning books by Lenin and portraits of Stalin, in the midst of
a number of Soviet flags. On whose side would he be, here, the one
who, to take up Badinter's formula again, does not grant to the
Other's thought its full freedom? Was Stalin an Other, for the
Hungarian workers?
"What is this power attributed by the censors to the written
word, field of the imaginary, in its transfer to reality?" affirms–
rather than asks - the text of one of the displays in the exhibition.
But it is not only the censors who presume this power; all of us who
write presume it, at least in our moments of euphoria, and many of
our readers do the same; in fact, there are many bridges between the
imaginary and the real. A word is a deed, and as such can serve the
best or the worst. Under the guise of propaganda (of state or party),
it can lead to violence or slavery; under the guise of "entertainment"
or advertisement, it can produce stupefaction . To defend oneself
