Critical Spirit under attack

We were told that after September 11 2001, nothing would be as it was before: A new world was born under the foundations of the World Trade Center, devoured by its own intestines, in a frightfully beautiful cloud of dust.

This is a terrible, horrible event; but horror is sadness. If we had to commemorate each of the horrors of perpetrators and victims at once, 365 days of the Patriots would not suffice, to say nothing of this mad minute of silence claimed by the governments as a strong symbolic act. We are reduced to silence again, while precisely at this point in time, we must speak. One does not owe anything to the death, except to live, and principally, we don’t have to stay silent. A minute of silence is a minute less for denouncing. The dead already has returned to the silence, but we will not die with them.

We were shocked, the horror immobilized us, we kept drinking pictures and commentaries poured by the media. Rejecting reality through criticism was difficult to take and we accepted to be reduced to silence. We accepted without doubting, the justifications of the leaders. In front of so much horror, criticism has no place to be… in front of so much horror, a government can legitimize to write our text for us.

We underwent unbelievable pictures, unimaginable in the order of our reality: we lived fiction pictures that we reasonably could not believe possible in our daily routine. It was an incursion into the terrifying unthinkable, impossible to be represented in our life. Is reality imaginable? How did we accept to dispossess ourselves of our clean word to play a text, a dictated role? How did we take that horror, the shock? We were taught a sense of submission, without protest, anesthetizing all vital capacity of doubt. This necessary doubt is an important element to research on the truth… This doubt is what forces us to be, to remain unreduced. This doubt is the first certainty of Descartes.

Renee Descartes, in the Meditations Metaphysics reveals an "I" that meditates and questions its own self. Its first interrogation relates to what I can know in certainty and in quantity. For that it is necessary to question all that could be false. Descartes is thus put to doubt very much in a hyperbolic way. This advance, from such method of knowledge raises its first certainty, clear, distinct and irrefutable: If I can call into question my significant knowledge as an abstract, I exist all the times that I doubt... "Because I doubt I am", "Because think I am".

The horror anesthetized doubt, political strength scorned liberty of expression, immobilizing the western world in a symbolic silence. Brief silence but inadmissible, if one reflects to its true meaning: Symbolical homage to those that are not more and will not be able to say a word or to place a symbol to the step of the world-wide opinion while forbidding all expression that criticizes, or again symbol of all past information that is now under silence.

To please ourselves in the shock, in the emotion, to drink the pictures and the words chosen by others without questioning for ourselves, this is to accept silence, accept to lose our own voice, and to do what someone else tells us to do. This is to accept; compose, support, embody a unique thought.

September 11th 2001 knew how to reinforce a method of thinking not very democratic: A method of agreement or disagreement without shades as the only means for reflection. As to the day following this date, all words not supporting or approving the ones of the Bush administration, were necessarily in the other side. "Who is not with us, is against us" hammers the president of the United States. Critics are reduced to absolute opposition, have no nuance, the world does not think for itself for more than in two colors.

Remain vigilant to the signs of a latent dictatorship where the dissidents of this Big Fight of Good against Evil will be necessary to fight, necessary perhaps on the side of the mean ones. Remain vigilant to the duties that the hypocrisy of leaders hidden under honest oracles and faces, are imposing on us. Remain vigilant to the “memories" the calendar will unfold on us: “September 11th, holy day of the Patriots… Remember, remember, and remember ". Done your obligatory memorial, you must remember that this is not a right, this is not a choice: this is a duty. A duty registers to the historical program, a date to keep by heart, with the direction that someone will have well wanted to give to that heart. Nevertheless, every day is always unique; let us maintain a critical look on that patriotism that some would prefer to acclaim or to sanctify.

Innocence is a freshness that was not given for us to know. We were not born in a world where we preexisted or that we fully constructed. We took over the world that we wanted or not. And this is not comfortable. We do not have a choice between two solutions, Good and Evil, be for or be against, this would be too easy: Seeking through both is not mistaken…

Neither Good nor Evil, our word could be incommensurable, multiple, rich elsewhere than in the simplistic way of sterile opposition. But, we can choose to be different, simply different.

Maybe we can choose to construct the world on the method of multiple delusions. The multiple is not quantifiable, it has no added measures, and it does not define himself in any opposition, stratification, hiérarchisation. It is opened; all is possible and without beginning. It is smoothed to the space, without limit, without border, without reference to a reduced unity. While thinking beyond frameworks and quantities, beyond all report of opposition, maybe we could live better, more human: rather than accepting the word of others, without simplifying the enemy too fast, even to the negativism of our selves.

Maybe I believe in a world of liberty of expression without measures, where all words are supposed to be placed in an open space of comprehension, with no reductions of the individual to the concept of opposition. This is in any case my life requirement and the way in which I am involved politically and artistically. Let us resist.