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PARTISAN REVIEW
against these actions is legitimate, even if fire is not the best method :
this is what explains the
auto-dales
in the streets of Budapest as well
as of Paris.
How could it be otherwise? Only a political illiterate could
believe the greatest freedom for all a sufficient principle for the regu–
lation of life in society. Since we live in community, our actions–
even solitary ones - produce effects on others; if nothing controls this
communal life, only force will count. Now, the freedom of the
strongest means the absence of freedom for the weak: it's the same
old story of the fox free in the chicken coop. Freedom for rapists
equals the submission of the raped. Or, to return to the various
forms of expression: If my neighbor has the irrepressible freedom to
slander me, I am no longer free to walk in the street without blush–
ing. If the purveyors of prostitution rings (another French specialty)
by Minitel are free to cover the walls of my city with posters of tor–
tured women or with women reduced to consumer objects, I am no
longer free to stroll without seeing them or to prevent my children
from internalizing this image. Democracy implies the existence of a
general will, which is
restrained
by the freedom of each citizen to do
what he wants only insofar as it doesn't concern anyone else; it is
unacceptable to elevate this limited freedom into an exclusive princi–
ple of action.
An unexpected episode shook the confidence of the exhibition's
organizers: a group of "Faurissonians" (those who deny the existence
of the gas chambers and of the "final solution" to the "Jewish prob–
lem") came to paste their posters and tracts right on the walls of the
exhibition. Far from rejoicing in this eruption of marginality, in this
spontaneous manifestation of the thought of the Other, the director
of the Beaubourg Library, with the help of his staff and several
visitors who had come to admire this celebration of free speech,
rushed to tear down the posters. A brawl broke out, and a complaint
was lodged, not, as Badinter had suggested, in the name of intoler–
ance and fear, but because racial hatred was incited . This hostile
reaction (which the organizers of the exhibition had not foreseen)
seemed perfectly natural to me: like innumerable other words, these
tracts and posters constitute an action, and it is normal to oppose it.
I am not, however, in favor of censorship of these publications, since
I fear it would only reproduce the "Baudelaire effect" (prohibited,
therefore good); but this trend apparently has already started .
The Freedom of Artists
In a recent interview
(London Review
oj
Books,
March 5, 1987),
