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What was remarkable in the simultaneous Strasbourg-Sarajevo Arttelevision broadcast, titled "le Couloir pour la parole" (a corridorfor free speech), on December 19 (1993) was the absolute status, theextraordinary superiority conferred by misery, distress, and totaldelusion. The very features which enabled the inhabitants of Sarajevoto treat the "Europeans" with contempt, or at least with a sarcasticfeeling of freedom that contrasted sharply with the remorse and thehypocritical regrets of their counterparts. They were not in need ofcompassion, they were in fact the ones to take pity on our dejectedcondition. "I spit on Europe", one of them was heard saying. No oneindeed can be more free, more sovereign in a rightful contempt,directed not so much at the enemy than at those whose good consciencebalks in the sun of so-called solidarity. And God knows that they haveseen lines of those people pass by. Lastly it was Susan Sontag who cameto have "Waiting for Godot" played in Sarajevo. Why not bring "Bouvard & Pecuchet" to Somalia or Afghanistan? But the worse is not about thiscultural soul-boosting. It is about the condescending manner in makingout what is strength & what is weakness. They are strong. It is us whoare weak and who go there to make good for our loss of strength andsense of reality.
The problem lies indeed in the nature of our reality. We have got onlyone, and it must be preserved. Even if it is by the use of the mostheinous of all paroles: "One must do something. One cannot remainidle." Yet, to do something for the sole reason that one cannot donothing never has been a valid principle for action, nor for liberty.At the most it is an excuse for one's own powerlessness and a token ofself-pity. The people of Sarajevo are not bothered by such questions.Being where they are, they are in the absolute need to do what they do,to do the right thing. They harbour no illusion about the outcome anddo not indulge in self-pity. This is what it means to be reallyexisting, to exist within reality. And this reality has nothing to dowith the so-called objective reality of their plight, which should notexist, and which we do so much deplore. This reality exits as such - itis the stark reality of action and destiny.
This is why they are alive, while we are dead. This is why we feelthe need to salvage the reality of war in our own eyes and to imposethis reality (to be pitiable) upon those who suffer from it, but do notreally believe in it, despite the fact they are in the midst of war andutter distress. Susan Sontag herself confesses in her diaries that theBosnians do not really believe in the suffering which surrounds them.They end up finding the whole situation unreal, senseless, andunexplainable. It is hell, but hell of what may be termed a hyperrealkind, made even more hyperreal by the harassment of the media and thehumanitarian agencies, because it renders the attitude of the worldtowards them even less unfathomable. Thus, they live in a kind ofghost-like war - which is fortunate, because otherwise, they wouldnever have been able to stand up to it. These are not my words, by theway: they say it so. But then Susan Sontag, hailing herself from NewYork, must know better than them what reality is, since she has chosenthem to incarnate it. Or maybe it is simply because reality is whatshe, and with her all the Western world, is lacking the most. Toreconstitute reality, one needs to head to where blood flows. All these"corridors", opened by us to funnel our foodstuffs and our "culture"are in fact our lifelines along which we suck their moral strength andthe energy of their distress. Yet another unequal exchange. And tothose who have found in a radical delusion of reality (and thisincludes the belief in political rationality, which supposedly rulesus, and which very much constitutes the principle of European reality)a kind of alternative courage, that is to survive a senselesssituation, to these people Susan Sontag comes to convince them of the"reality" of their suffering, by making something cultural andsomething theatrical out of it, so that it can be useful as a referentwithin the theatre of western values, including "solidarity". But SusanSontag herself is not the issue. She is merely a societal instance ofwhat has become the general situation whereby toothless intellectualsswap their distress with the misery of the poor, both of themsustaining each other, both of them locked in a perverse agreement.This parallels the way the political class and civil society areswapping their respective misery: one throwing up corruption andscandals, the other its purposeless convulsions and its inertia. Thus,not so long ago, one could witness Bourdieu and Abbe Pierre offeringthemselves as televisual slaughtering lambs trading with each otherpathetic language and sociological garble about poverty.
Our whole society is thus on its way towards "commiseration" in themost literal sense of the word (under the cloak of ecumenical bathos).It looks like as if we are in the midst of an immense feeling of guilt,shared by intellectuals and politicians alike, and which is linked tothe end of history and the downfall of values. Then, it has becomenecessary to replenish the pond of values, the pond of references, andto do so by using that smallest common denominator which is thesuffering of the world, and in doing so, replenishing our game reserveswith artificial fowls. "At the moment, it has become impossible to showanything else than suffering in the news broadcasts on television",reports David Schneidermann. Ours is a victim-society. I gather thatsociety is merely expressing its own disappointment and longing for animpossible violence against itself. Everywhere, a New IntellectualOrder is following on the heels of the New World Order. Everywhere, wesee distress, misery and suffering becoming the basic stuff of theprimitive scene. The status of victimhood, paired with human rights isthe sole funeral ideology. Those who do not directly exploit it do it byproxy - there is no dearth of mediators who take some surplus value offinancial or symbolic nature along the way. Loss and suffering, justlike the global debt, are negotiable and for sale on the speculativemarket, that is, the intellectual-political market - which is in no wayundermining the military-industrial complex of old & sinister days.
Every commiseration is grounded within the logic of suffering. To referto suffering, even if it is to fight it, lends it an unending base ofobjective reproduction. It is clear that in order to fight whatever,one must start from the evil, not from the suffering. It is absolutelyobvious that in Sarajevo we may witness the scene of the transparencyof Evil. The concealed cancer-cell which causes everything else to rot,the virus whose blatant symptom the Europeans' paralysis has become.One seems to salvage the European inventory in the GATT negotiations,but in the meanwhile it is thrown in the flames at Sarajevo. In acertain sense, it is a good thing. Bogus Europe, vanishing Europe,Europe that has been squandered in the most hypocritical of dealings,this Europe is exposed in Sarajevo. In that sense, the Serbs couldalmost be hailed as the demystifying instrument, the savage analyst ofthat ghostly Europe, creature of those techno-democratic politicianswho are as triumphant in their discourses as they are ineffective intheir deeds. One sees how Europe is disintegrating just as thediscourse of united Europe flowers (exactly as the situation of humanrights is worsening just as the discourse on human rights isproliferating). But this is not even the fine point of the story. Thefine point is that the Serbs, as carriers of the ethnic cleansing, areat the apex of the kind of Europe in the making; because the "real"Europe that is being made, is a white Europe, a Europe 'made' white,integrated and cleansed, in the moral sense, in the economic sense, andin the ethnic sense. This Europe is being made victoriously in, and inthat sense, what happens there is not an untimely occurrence on the waytowards a pious and democratic Europe, which does not exist, but alogical and ascending step towards the New European Order, itself abranch of the New World Order, whose distinctive features everywhereare white fundamentalism, protectionism, discrimination and control.
Some say: if we let this happen in Sarajevo, it will happen to uslater on. What nonsense! It has befallen us already. All Europeancountries are on the road to ethnic cleansing. This is the real Europethat is being slowly put together in the shadow of nationalparliaments. And Serbia is in forward position. There is no need toinvoke some kind of passivity, some inability to react, since we aredealing with a programme being logically implemented, of which Bosniais merely the actual frontier. Why do you think that Le Pen has all butvanished from the (French) political scene? He has vanished because theessence of his ideas has completely infiltrated the political class,taking the garb of "the French particularity", the holy union, theeuronationalist impulse, or plain protectionism. No use any longer forLe Pen. He won, not as a political person, but as a virus, having takenover the minds. Why would you believe that things will remain limitedin Sarajevo. It is the same thing that is at stake everywhere. Nodisplay of solidarity is going to change anything about that. It willstop only the day that the killing will end, that is when the bordersof "white" Europe will have been redrawn. It is as if Europe, allnationalities, all political movements, no matter which, had "taken acontract", a killer's contract with the Serbs, who have become theagents of the dirty jobs for the West. Just as the West had taken acontract with Saddam Hussein against Iran. The problem is that if thekiller overdoes it, he must be eliminated too. But if the operationsagainst Iraq and in Somalia look like failures within the establishmentof the New World Order, then the Bosnian case looks promising withinthe New European one.
The Bosnians know that much. They know they have been forfeited, not bysome fascistic remnant or revival, but by the international"democratic" order. They know they are bound to be exterminated orexiled or excluded like all heterogeneous and unassimalable elementsthe world over. There is no reprieve, because, however distasteful thismay sound to the false guilty consciousness of Western democrats andhumanitarians, this is the unswerving way of development. Modern Europewill be built on the bones of its Muslims and Arabs, as we can see allover. Unless they survive as immigrant slaves. And the strongestobjection against this offensive of the guilty conscience such as isdisplayed in happenings like the Strasbourg one, is that by fuellingthe image of the alleged lack of resolve of the European policies,together with that of a European conscience torn by its ownpowerlessness, it covers up the whole of the really on-going operationby granting it the benefit of spiritual doubt.
The people of Sarajevo who appeared on the screen during the Artbroadcast were surely harbouring no illusion nor hope. But they did notlook like potential martyrs either. They had objective plight, realsuffering on their side. The true misery, that of the false apostlesand voluntary martyrs, was on the other side. But then, is it notwritten that "to the voluntary martyr no recompense shall be given inthe after-world."
Baudrillard, Jean. "No Reprieve For Sarajevo." Liberation, January 8, 1994. Available: http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/reprieve.html
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