” Le Point” was pinned by Claude Askolovitch this Thursday on France Inter. In question, the text by Michel Houellebecq that we published in this week’s issue, deemed “disgusting and unworthy of Le Point” by the columnist who keeps the daily press review. More serious are the accusations that Claude Askolovitch pronounces against the newspaper, of which he was the collaborator: “Houellebecq is lying, and Le Point says nothing about it”, which would be “sad for what we have left of ideas” . In this text, which was his first reaction to the threats of a complaint for racism on the part of the Great Mosque, Houellebecq writes, about Jean-Paul Sartre: “Moved by a justified self-hatred, he called in a text that has remained famous to the murder of white men. The text in question is the preface to Les Damnés de la Terre, an anti-colonialist book by Franz Fanon written in 1961, reread by the journalist from Inter who believes that “not for a moment does he call for the murder of white men”. The philosopher Bérénice Levet also re-read the preface to Les Damnés de la Terre. She delivers another interpretation… Here is her text.
“In the first phase of the revolt, you have to kill: to kill a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to eliminate at the same time an oppressor and an oppressed: there remains a dead man and a free man. The sentence is well and truly signed by Jean-Paul Sartre, it appears in the preface he wrote for The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon which appeared in 1961. Factual data, which everyone can verify.
And yet. When Claude Askolovitch, the columnist of the Matinale de France Inter, responsible for the press review, reads the preface of the French philosopher, he does not meet anywhere “white men” – perhaps a European, but he will keep well to point it out, unless, in his mind, from the white man to the European, the consequence cannot be good! –, so that the ax falls, the journalist delivers, without appeal, his double verdict: Michel Houellebecq is lying, and this with the complicity of the management and the editorial staff of the weekly Point which publishes the text of the novelist and refers precisely to the Wretched of the Earth. “Houellebecq is lying, and Point says nothing about it. “And the chronicler to dare (but we know the words of Michel Audiard): “And it’s sad for what we have left of ideas. »
In other words, not only does Claude Askolovitch brazenly lie on the radio “the most listened to in France” at this hour and publicly slander, with total impunity, both the novelist and an editorial staff and his management. But in addition with the complicity of the two animators of the morning: neither Nicolas Demorand, master of the reminders of the press review, nor Léa Salamé will authorize a lesser correction; neither of them will dare to object to Sartre’s sentence and thereby instill some doubt in the minds of the listeners. Obviously, I can always be opposed to the ignorance of our journalists, if not of Sartre’s most famous sentence, at least its source, but anyway, allow me to be skeptical… our two presenters have legitimate claims, they pique to be educated, cultured, in short not to be “simple” journalists. Where was also Yael Goosz, doctor of “fake news” tracking?
This trial is all the more unfair because Point on the contrary, offers the opportunity to Michel Houellebecq to deploy a rigorous argumentation, totally foreign to this “gall” attributed to him by Askolovitch.
READ ALSOEXCLUSIVE. Michel Houellebecq responds to the accusations
I wonder if that day, Thursday January 5, 2023, Claude Askolovitch did not take a new step. Its daily press review is both, and from the beginning, the high mass and the court. The man asserts, peremptorily, “his” truths, delivers, from the height of his pulpit, his sentences, each more icy than the other – he likes to play the Minos or the Osiris and dispatches without delay, but always in a tone suave, always velvety, in Hell which does not regard immigration as a “wealth for France” -, and the chronicler of lulling us with stories more soothing than each other – who has the boldness to worry wokist theses , or not to subscribe to gender theory. “Everyone plays the god by judging, it’s good or bad,” said Pascal, and Askolovitch likes to play the god. Moreover, that day, we learned very slowly, as Madame Pernelle would say in Tartuffe, that Michel Onfray had moved to the extreme right. I don’t invent anything. The tribune of Askolovitch, because let’s call things by their name, can be listened to or read, it is fully transcribed on the France Inter site.
The columnist is not asked to step aside. A press review is by definition selective, its manager chooses the articles which seem to him to deserve to be put forward, distinguished. Reading is a subjective act, And besides, man likes to stage himself. Affecting a somewhat infantile tone, the “I” is everywhere in his press review: “I learn”, “I discover”, “I like”. An “I” which, however, skilfully disappears when it comes to delivering its sentences – these claim to be perfectly objective. If we do not demand total neutrality, we demand at least fidelity to the writings and their authors.
How can France Inter, and particularly its morning show, dare to caricature itself to such an extent? Until when does the public service intend to be the arbiter of respectability? Doesn’t Léa Salamé claim to have a taste, perhaps a passion, for conversation, argument, complexity? Dissenting voices are banned from France Inter. Let’s read John Stuart Mill again: truths that are not open to discussion are dry truths. Let us recall with the Scottish philosopher the brilliant discovery of the Catholic Church: the institutionalization of the figure of the devil’s advocate before any canonization of the saints. May France Inter stop being afraid, and invite the devil to its table!
* Bérénice Levet, philosopher, essayist. Last book published: The Courage of Dissent. The French spirit against wokism (Observatory editions, November 2022)