Let's not sacralize Charlie Hebdo

In the wake of the tragedy, many publications across the West have rushed to print reproductions of Charlie Hebdo covers as proof that terrorist violence cannot dampen free expression. Such homage to the magazine in its agony is in one sense fitting and proper, but in another sense it is the precise opposite of what the living Charlie was about.

Reproducing the imagery created by the murdered artists tends to sacralize them as embodiments of some abstract ideal of free speech. But many of the publications that today honor the dead as martyrs would yesterday have rejected their work as tasteless and obscene, as indeed it often was. The whole point of Charlie’s satire was to be tasteless and obscene, to respect no proprieties, to make its point by being untameable and incorrigible and therefore unpublishable anywhere else. The speech it exemplified was not free to express itself anywhere but in its pages. Its spirit was insurrectionist and anti-idealist, and its creators would be dumbfounded to find themselves memorialized as exemplars of a freedom that they always insisted was perpetually in danger and in need of a defense that only offensiveness could provide. To transform the shock of Charlie’s obscenities into veneration of its martyrdom is to turn the magazine into the kind of icon against which its irrepressible iconoclasm was directed. But as the poet Stéphane Mallarmé wrote of Edgar Allan Poe, death has a way of revealing the essence of things — and the essence of Charlie Hebdo was to express the inexpressible in images with the power to shock and offend…

In mourning the tragedy, let us not forget that Charlie Hebdo was shocking, obscene and offensive because the world is — as today’s shocking, obscene and offensive tragedy makes clear.