Negrophilia

Two situations, both critical and insoluble. One is the total worthlessness of contemporary art. The other is the impotence of the political class in front of Le Pen. The two situations are exchangeable, and their solutions are transferable. Indeed, the inability to offer any political alternative to Le Pen is displaced to the cultural terrain, to the domain where a Holy Cultural Alliance prevails. Conversely, the problematization of contemporary art can only come from a reactionary, irrational, or even fascist mode of thinking.

What can we oppose to such a dignified conjuration of imbeciles? Nothing. There is unfortunately nothing which can remedy such a mechanism of intellectual perversion. This mechanism is based upon the bad conscience and the total impotence of the so-called "democratic" elites who are unable to find a solution to both impasses, that of contemporary art and that of the political struggle against the Front National. The elites have simply chosen to fuse the two problems together in a single moralizing and vituperative discourse. The real question, then, becomes whether one can still open one's mouth, utter anything which may sound strange, irreverent, heterodoxical or paradoxical without being automatically called a fascist (which is, let's admit it, a way of paying tribute to fascism). Why has every moral, conventional, or conformist discourse - traditional rightist discourses - moved to the left?
Conjuring of Imbeciles, Jean Baudrillard