On Political Enemies and ‘Zoological Metaphors’

A certain character of admittedly limited intelligence, Monsieur Assouline, remarked on his blog – you’re either modern or you’re not – that I called those Socialists who joined the Sarkozy government ‘rats’ and christened Sarkozy himself the ‘Rat Man’. Anyone with even a modicum of education would immediately have grasped that I am referring here (not without a rhetorical subtlety they should surely commend) to the metaphor of rats leaving a sinking ship, to the legend of the Pied Piper who led the rats out of the city, and to Freud’s celebrated case of the Rat Man.* Does Monsieur Assouline have any education? He knows well enough, at least, where he wants to end up. Since the last war and the Nazis, he proclaims (follow closely), no one has ever treated anyone at all as a rat…

The oddest thing is that the leader of these media intellectuals committed to Restoration, Bernard-Henri Levy, should jump on the bandwagon without even citing his inglorious source. Thus we read in Le Monde:

In a recent book, The Meaning of Sarlcozy [De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?], Alain Badiou used his just struggle against what he finds ‘disgusting’ to reintroduce into the political lexicon those zoological metaphors (‘rats’, ‘the Rat Man’) that Sartre unequivocally showed, in his preface to
[Fanon's] The Wretched of the Earth, always bear the mark of Fascism.**

…Sartre, throughout his essential essay The Communists and Peace, written in 1953-54, referred to anti-Communists as ‘rats’. He certainly did so with far more good humour than the way he himself was treated as a ‘typing hyena’, not by the fascists but by his Communist allies. The same Sartre uttered the famous sentence that ‘every anti-Communist is a swine’. So we see that, well after the war, animals were still used on all sides … I particularly like the Chinese usage to denote two apparent enemies who are really complicit with one another – as for Mao were the Soviet Union under Khrushchev and the United States under Kennedy, and I could say the same for my part of the Socialist Party and Sarkozy in matters of xenophobic and ’security’ legislation. The Chinese then spoke of ‘two badgers from the same hill’. I love this image, and used it in the present book with reference to a fact that my English readers will appreciate: during the election campaign, both Sarkozy and Segolene Royal praised Tony Blair – Blair, blaireau [badger] … translate it howyou can! So I’ve added to ‘zoological metaphors’ the ignominy of a play on words.

I can only plead guilty and expose myself to Sarkozy’s legislation on recidivism (legislation, let us say in passing, that is openly directed against ordinary people, and therefore abominable). I claim the right to use ‘zoological metaphors’ – I don’t have a hang-up about them. It is characteristic of politics that there are enemies, even if capitalo-parliamentarism presses its domination to the point of trying to make us forget this. And why the hell, if there are real enemies, shouldn’t I be allowed to insult them? To compare them with vultures, jackals, reptiles, even rats – not to mention hyenas, whether typing or otherwise? Not everyone can be compared with an eagle, like Bossuet, or a bull, like the Fourth Republic Prime Minister Joseph Laniel, even a fox, as Mitterrand regularly was. And now, ladies and gentlemen, a touch of humour. If Selogene Royal makes me think of a painted goat, and Prime Minister Fillon a sleeping weasel, there’s no need to hit the roof.

Enjoy your reading, whatever your favourite animal.

Paris,
22 July 2008

Alain Badiou,
Introduction to the English-Language Edition,
The Meaning of Sarkozy

* [Pierre Assouline is a writer and journalist who runs a popular blog called La
Republique des Livres]
** ‘De quoi Sine est-il le nom?’, Bernard-Henri Levy, Le Monoe, 21 July 2008.