Political scientist Sergei Medvedev talks about how our freedom is connected with going beyond the boundaries of decency in culture.
It’s not just about the exponentiality, performativity and totality of reprisals. The fact is that here the great European tradition of buffoonery is called into question (and not only European — remember Khoja Nasreddin). It is put not only by these religious bastards, but also by ourselves when we say that their caricatures were sometimes beyond the bounds of taste and decency.
Yes they were. But crossing this line is an important part of the tradition, a guarantee of the stability of culture, the admission of carnival as a legitimate cultural rite. From the carnival, inseparable from the city, the square, freedom, European democracy was born. From the figure of the jester, to whom everything is permitted, the tradition of enlightened Voltairian skepticism is born, from which, again, the French Revolution and the Republic grow. The caricature itself was born at the dawn of the New Age, in the era of religious dissidence, and became the key to the confessional, and then the national diversity of Europe. Bakhtin here would speak about the political significance of the carnival, and Lotman about the importance of a lateral, buffoonish escape from the bestial seriousness of binary oppositions, which invariably end in an explosion. Carnival is an explosion of make-believe, a spectacle that avoids much deeper social upheavals.
- The Age of Anxiety
And that is why culture needs acts of linguistic, visual and performative transgression, work with forbidden topics, images, words, deliberate disregard for the norms of taste and decency. We need caricatures of Christ and Muhammad; We need jokes about the Gulag and the Holocaust, we need Sorokin, who is completely based on the profanation of the Soviet and the sacred, and his famous sex scene of Stalin and Khrushchev in Blue Fat, which caused the writer to be persecuted. And his scene of group sex of the guardsmen (reminiscent of the forbidden episodes of the dance of the guardsmen in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible) is stylistically similar to one of the covers of Charlie Hebdo, which ridicules sodomy and pedophilia in the highest Catholic clergy. We need the Voina group, which draws a 74-meter member opposite the FSB Directorate, and the Pussy Riot group, singing verses at the Execution Ground and in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and the artist Pyotr Pavlensky, nailing his scrotum to the sacred paving stones of Red Square. We need, in the end, an inscription of three letters on the fence, which makes us understand that we are still alive.
As it turned out after the execution of Charlie, all these are not marginal, not peripheral zones of contemporary art and political satire, but the very core of our culture, democracy and freedom. This is our strength, not weakness, our advantage over the fundamentalist radicals of all religions, who, crushed by their taboos, unable to cope with the elements of laughter and sex, explode in acts of apocalyptic terrorism. And that’s why nous sommes Charlie.
* Source: https://www.facebook (an extremist organization banned in Russia).com/sergei.medvedev3/posts/10206034709535104