It Is Not About Winning the Marbles, but the Right to Play the Game

This comes a little late; it is no longer topical. But the feeling that surfaces from time to time, whenever another debate about freedom of expression flares up, for example, remains the same: what bothers me about public cynics and satirists, with the Charlie Hebdo clan now leading the way, is their willingness to serve up a lack of humour and imagination as a bitter pill one simply has to swallow if one considers oneself a “believer in free speech”. They also assume that this “believer in free speech” needs so-called “soldiers of free speech” who, pumped full of adrenaline and with right on their side, or so they believe, dutifully mark out the boundaries of this precious principle. Because that is what they do!

How can I make it clear to them that I do not experience these boundaries in the first place, and that I regard the sacred cows they think they must demolish as having been erected by them for that very purpose? An honourable deed, they say.

At any rate, here is something I do not find funny: when deaths occur along this battle line — the heads were not pushed firmly enough onto the stakes — I am, for some reason, supposed to feel indebted to the victims, solely because these combative bureaucrats dare to imagine themselves possessed of a refined, almost culinary gift for foul language, with which they will blow a little room into the heads of the narrow-minded: their potential readers, in other words, including me?

To anyone willing to understand, I therefore make it known that I have no interest in such interference — your camp is not mine — and that, in this matter, I am after the marbles, not the honour.

1 June 2016. Read aloud at De Idee, with Paul Cliteur, 6 December 2018.