On the Couch with Dr Sid

Kompromat was a standard weapon in the KGB’s arsenal in the former Soviet Union. The system involved luring critics of the regime into a hotel room with a hired prostitute, where a hidden camera meticulously recorded everything. The material could then be used to blackmail or damage the person concerned. During the Cold War, the technique was known as a honeypot: female secret agents were instructed to extract state secrets in bed. Reportedly, former KGB man President Putin also possesses compromising videos of Donald Trump, dating from his visit to Moscow. Closer to home, a year ago, media figures Stan Van Samang and Peter Van de Veire fell into a trap set by a certain Eveline, leading to the circulation of intimate photographs and videos, with much hilarity, schadenfreude and clumsy apologising as a result.

Just to say: the flesh is weak, especially male flesh. Sex and blackmail make an ideal combination, and the internet supplies plenty of publicity. Recently, the story reached us from the Netherlands of my friend and philosophical fellow traveller Sid Lukkassen, caught up in an almost surreal plot on which I would like to shed a little light. First, the facts in brief.

Honeypot

Last summer, a certain Jini van Rooijen, described as a “left-wing philosophy student from Amsterdam”, posted an appeal on the Dutch website GeenStijl for “right-wing men” to volunteer for a video project in which sex would bring the polarisation between left and right to a halt. Sid Lukkassen responded to this distinctly grotesque invitation.

He ends up in Jini’s apartment, where an entire film crew is present, although Sid says he thought this would be a “one-to-one conversation”. When the left-wing girl backs out at a certain point, the philosopher smells a rat and asks that the footage not be made public. Unfortunately, that becomes the material for the film, called—yes—Honeypot, which premiered on 27 October at the debate centre De Balie in Amsterdam. Despite loud protests from Lukkassen.

In fact, this is just the latest prank by the artists’ collective KIRAC, “Keeping It Real Art Critics”, which specialises in provocative productions ridiculing absolutely everything and everyone, beginning with the intellectual and artistic establishment itself and its funding networks, the “baby-boomer elites”, but also the woke and cancel culture. Its instigators, Stefan Ruitenbeek and his partner Kate Sinha, see art as a radical form of über-satire that casts aside all moral principles, since these generally surface only when someone takes offence or feels insulted.

Had Sid Lukkassen failed to do his homework? Did his metaphysical, aestheticising worldview play tricks on him, preventing him from seeing the trap? Or was it his autistic disposition—to which he himself refers—combined with a dose of vanity that made him vulnerable? We ask him ourselves.

An authentic encounter

Sid, man, how the hell did you walk into that with your eyes wide open?

“It has been very difficult for me to talk about this, and it literally took me months even to put my thoughts on paper and reconstruct what happened. I had deliberately looked up nothing about that woman online. That would mean letting the internet influence what you think of someone—I wanted an authentic encounter.”

Whether or not you gave written consent remains disputed.

“I agreed to or signed nothing, absolutely nothing. I came for an exploratory conversation, that is all. They simply began filming and recording from the moment I rang the doorbell. Nothing was signed, no document of any kind, no quitclaim. My signature is on nothing.”

You see it as an attempt at character assassination by the mainstream media?

“Het Parool in particular went a long way with this. But a countermovement has also emerged, with people such as Paul Cliteur who are furious with KIRAC and the way they deal with privacy, sexual violence, intimidation and so forth.”

Even a large part of the left and the feminists defended you. As a right-wing commentator, do you not find that rather bizarre?

“I still think it is important to open myself to people of other political persuasions, and I am emphatically open to projects that explore differences. In my life I have found that you can also experience productive forces with someone whose ideology is diametrically opposed to your own political background. In search of that energy, I arranged to meet Jini. Of course not to make a ‘real’ porn film, but to meet Jini, talk about her motives for the project and then discover, step by step, how far we would want to go with it. I saw it as two actors considering a film project together. First you do a try-out to discover whether you become attuned to one another; if you do not, you do not pursue the project.”

That appeal for a sexual solution to the polarity of left and right strikes me as a parody of Hegelian dialectics. And then, halfway through filming, you shout “stop!”

“Although I had misgivings and made them known, the makers still wanted to go ahead with publishing the film. The product of my despair became the instrument of their hope. Announcements about me appeared without my being consulted. From that point on I felt ambushed by the reports, on top of serious personal setbacks such as my operation and my grandmother’s death. This caused a series of persistent stress-related symptoms, forcing me to withdraw from the project for health reasons.”

Then KIRAC created a media event, and all your struggling became part of the staging. Are you not doing exactly what they intend—giving it publicity and feeding the appetite for sensation?

“I feel seriously shafted, and lately I have not been the strongest version of myself either. This is predatory behaviour: exploiting people’s emotional vulnerability, kicking them further into the abyss precisely when they need a helping hand. A few politicians are also responsible: they kicked the stool from under me when I already had my neck in the noose. Afterwards I confided in KIRAC, but KIRAC tore the corpse apart and displayed the pieces publicly for ridicule and derision.”

Yet you still considered going to the premiere. As what? A clown? A victimised right-wing philosopher?

“At the very end I received a message offering a certain oral service if I came to the premiere.”

An oral service??

“Yes. But since it had now literally been said in public that I would be ‘sacrificed’, and since I am abroad receiving medical treatment for persistent neck problems caused by an overdose of stress, I had to decline that honour. [Sighs.] What do you make of all this, Johan?”

I have checked several times whether it is already 1 April, Sid. But it would pass as Halloween horror too.

A visual culture gone overboard

As Sid’s friend and colleague, I find this difficult. The blind eagerness with which he accepted the invitation is hard to reconcile with his status as a critical philosopher, who should have his head in the clouds but also both feet on the ground. We live in a visual culture gone overboard and a dictatorship of publicity. Everything has to be captured on video, doubling one’s own existence into a semi-fictional story, with social media as its platform. Sensationalism lurks everywhere; right-wing commentators and thinkers have to be doubly careful.

Even the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche occasionally ventured into pornographic satire—well, sort of.

Should a philosopher outside the mainstream go along with this, making things so easy for the media? Lukkassen’s longing for intellectual security—the whole idea of a “right-wing pillar”—and fear of being misunderstood are precisely what make him vulnerable. Is the tendency to portray himself as a hero, saint and martyr in a highly personal creation story, a Don Quixote-like journey towards truth and essence, not the first step towards a self-caricature that attracts people like KIRAC?

The debate in the Netherlands about KIRAC’s methods continues. An interesting debate. And I have to admit that, for all my sympathy for my companion, I can appreciate it as a joke. Lukkassen is one of the leading young thinkers in the Netherlands, and such a person can occasionally be the subject of satirical constructions, even embarrassing little traps.

Unfortunately, he is not blessed with much humour or the ability to put himself in perspective; that is something to work on. His Calvinist seriousness is rather alien to us Flemings: the former mayor of Aalst, Ilse Uyttersprot, once appeared in the carnival as the “tower fucker” after the entire Flemish press had shown a video of her making love at a historic site in Greece. That is real class. Simply putting the “Honeypot” on the table is still the best strategy. A French president also had an apt comment: “Et alors?”—“So what?”