In defense of the Great Replacement Theory's neologist
That barely literate conspiracy theorists misuse Renaud Camus is a travesty, the man is an honnête homme of the highest order.
[NOTE: I have written on the UK election but that is with the powers that be of the normal publishing world so stay tuned for that…today instead I turn again to France…]
Today France votes in the second and final round of its legislative election and the prospect of a triumphant National Rally is, of course, a fear-provoking one for many. In particular those interviewed by the venerable Aljazeera news. With this in mind then, I would like to turn to one of France’s most interesting writers, Renaud Camus, whose name has become synonymous with one of our age’s most ideologically charged terms: the Great Replacement.
Coined in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement to describe perceptible European demographic shifts in recent decades, the term quickly morphed into ‘theories’, then of course conspiracy theories, so that Renaud Camus’ English Wikipedia page now reads “Renaud Camus is a French novelist, conspiracy theorist, and white nationalist writer”. A novelist first, but a fascist, racist, nut-job in the same breath.
If you are not familiar with the Great Replacement Theory in its conspiratorial formulation, Camus’s English Wikipedia page as well as the English ‘Great Replacement Theory’ page are good enough summaries, as long as you keep in mind that whoever wrote them ignores much of Camus’ formidable oeuvre and does little to place him in his French context. This may be partly out of ignorance (almost none of Camus’ work has been translated into English) and the page is of course written for an English audience, so should primarily reflect Camus’ reception in and influence on the English-speaking world – un vrai bordel if ever there was one, as I hope to make clear.
For now, however, anyone who is interested in the man himself and happens to have some French should read his French Wikipedia page, which is far more informative (and concise). It opens in a quite different manner to its English counterpart:
“Renaud Camus is a writer associated with far-right political activism and is notable for publishing an annual diary since 1980. He maintains a 14th century castle, played a minor role in the homosexual movement of the 70s, but remains little known outside of art and literary circles.”
The art and literary circles Camus inhabited are crucial to keep in mind when considering his later work because he was and remains above all an aesthete, and apart from a brief acknowledgment that he knew Roland Barthes and Andy Warhol (famous in the Anglosphere I suppose) important figures like Louis Aragon, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras are missing from his English page.
What we have here is of course a failure to communicate, and as I write this it has just been brought to my attention that there is an entire, separate, Great Replacement conspiracy theory in the United States Wikipedia page, which really says it all.
Camus has published over 150 books and his personal journal, published every year since 1980, typically runs over 500 pages. Again, this all remains only in French. What we do have in English, finally, however, is the first authorised English translation of Camus’ political writings Enemy of the Disaster released by Vauban Books last October.
The collection brings together a wide range of writings by Camus spanning the years 2007-2017 and is edited and co-translated by Louis Betty, himself of note in that he is one of only a handful of scholars in the English-speaking world who have published on Michel Houellebecq at length (see his book Without God: Michel Houellebecq and Materialist Horror).
In his foreword, Betty, a Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, asks what anyone who is familiar with Camus’ vast and wide ranging oeuvre—again, he has published over 150 books that range from elegies to books on topography to pieces of theatre—has had to ask themselves: “How did the Frenchman Renaud Camus, once a gay literary icon and, moreover, avowed proponent of non-violence, come to be associated with the noxious fulminations of racist identitarians in the English-speaking world?”
The English, and indeed American, Wikipedia pages answer Betty’s question in part, but the more direct answer is of course rhetoric. As Betty notes: “Succinct and provocative terminology such as the great replacement—not to mention such incendiary language as genocide by substitution (not Camus’ coinage)—are easily appropriated by ideological bad actors who, while likely having little or no familiarity with the substance of Camus’ thought, are able to decontextualise his terminology for use as a racist cudgel in interactions with detractors.”
Betty states that the purpose of the volume—perhaps its most pressing purpose—is to make “such a cudgel unavailable by filling in this contextual vacuum” and Betty does this simply by making Camus’ writing accessible, and apart from his foreword, what follows is Camus in his own (deftly translated, and approved) words.
Before I begin my defense of the man and his work, however, I should note that in France Camus has faced scandals. In 2001, he was accused of antisemitism after certain passages of his 1994 journal were published. He was defended by two highly placed friends, writer and film director Emmanuel Carrère and the Jewish commentator Alain Finkielkraut, however the scandal was damaging and is known in France as L’Affaire Camus. Betty goes into L’Affaire in some detail and this is worth reading. As we shall see, Camus is deeply preoccupied by language (he is a Cratylist) and Betty explains well how much of L’Affaire “spoke to an intractable difficulty in negotiating the often tense relationship in Camus’ writing between perceived provocation…and a relentless if not obsessive need to say everything, especially that which is, at least officially, unsayable”.
The ‘unsayable’, and ‘perceived provocation’ plagued Camus’ again when in 2014 he was charged and convicted of ‘inciting racial hatred’ for a speech in which he appeared to liken suburban Muslim youth to soldiers in a war of conquest against France. His reputation recovered, however only after a vastly expanded edition of Le Grand Remplacement was published in 2021.
So, in English and in French, it is important that the man is not taken out of context. I refer to Camus here as ‘the man’ quite deliberately, rather than say stressing that one must be careful not to cherrypick phrases or terms when reading him, because when I read him I really am reading ‘Renaud Camus, the man’. That is Renaud Camus: homosexual, ex-Communist, Cratylist, aesthete, and so on.
It is important to know then that the only other piece of Camus’ writing translated into English is his 1979 book Tricks, which described in detail the writer’s numerous gay sexual encounters, and where he coined a ‘real’ neologism, his word for ‘gay’ achrien. Tricks was prefaced by Roland Barthes, whom Camus was an acolyte of, and his first musings are informed by bathmology, or the study of levels of language and discourse, as described in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, 1975. These were followed by the kind of post-structuralism you would probably not encounter on a modern day social sciences university course, that is, post-structuralism in action, or novels. Highly formalistic in content and execution, but novels nonetheless, in the Nouveau Roman style.
I note that my reading of Camus rejects entirely the theory Barthes is most widely known for— ‘the death of the author’—but Camus rejected this notion, too, and although he was a member of the Socialist Party in the 70s and 80s and voted for Mitterrand in 1981, he soon parted ways with the communists, and dismissed the Socialist Party with the following remark in 2012: “The Socialist Party has published a political program titled Pour changer de civilisation ("To change civilization"). We are among those who, to the contrary, refuse to change civilization.”
Now known by most as a darling of Le Pen and perhaps for founding his own anti-immigration political party Parti de l'In-nocence ("Party of No-harm") in 2012, Camus’ political allegiances are not so straightforward and he remains, I think sensibly, a bit of a mixed bag. He supported the left-wing politician Jean-Pierre Chevènement for some time, and in the 2002 presidential election voted for the ecologist candidate Noël Mamère.
Homosexual, ex-Communist, intense formalist, and perhaps above all prolific, what then does this decidedly exotic man—exotic at least, I imagine for the likes of Tucker Carlson—have to say really about immigration, and about the so-called ‘culture wars’, a term he would no doubt place at the very bottom of any analysis of the ascending spiral of meaning.
I will argue that what he has to say is quite plain. And about as sober and reasonable, as close to what we might understand as a measured in the English tradition, as it goes for the French. I think Renaud Camus is rather an honnête homme. In order to illustrate a little why, I will very briefly read some of his 2007 essay ‘The Communism of the Twenty-First Century’, the first in the collection Enemy of the Disaster with the hope that others may consider his work now that more of it is available in English. I will then read his essay on antiracism with some of his writings on homosexuality and show how, unlike Jean Genet, Camus’s philosophical position prevents him from going anywhere near racism properly understood. I will end with a quote from Camus that I think is appropriate for France today, and today a little bit more than any other day.
Me and Camus in his own (translated, authorised) words: “Antiracism is the communism of the twenty-first century”
Camus takes the title of his essay from a remark made by Alain Finkielkraut in late 2005 that “Antiracism is the communism of the twenty-first century”. Camus understands Finkielkraut’s statement to be less a comparison in the sense of a ‘likening’, and certainty not a conflation between the two, but a suspicion that ‘antiracism’ in its influence, ability to inspire action, and its salience in public discourse, or as he puts it ‘its salience in the depths of conscience’ are of the same order and magnitude as communism was in the twentieth century.
An essential common feature of the two ideologies, and one that Camus understands diachronically, is that:
At least at the dawn of their respective eras of greatest extension, both presented themselves as eminently well-meaning, to such a degree that they passed more for moral codes than for ideologies. Indeed, both—but antiracism to a much greater extent and much more persuasively than communism—have been able to pass for the exclusive holders of moral authority, with which they came to be genuinely conflated, their discourse and positions seen as rigorously coinciding with it.
The upshot is that this allows both to avoid debate, in that they do not have adversaries (with whom one may calmly debate) but only irreconcilable enemies, who I would argue (thinking here of antiracism) they are at pains to silence, and who Camus writes ‘they can only hope to destroy’.
Camus is thinking of antiracism here too when he juxtaposes ‘debate’ with the vociferous ‘destroy’ and he notes that antiracism is distinct from communism in that it seems to really have a monopoly on hatred. His description of how antiracism ‘hates’ is so reminiscent of Brendan O’Neill, if Brendan O’Neill was French, that I must quote some of it here, and at the same time direct readers to O’Neill’s most recent book where he makes this exact point in almost as colourful language A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable and which I reviewed earlier this year here.
So, Camus observes that antiracism seems to have not only a monopoly on hatred but:
…an exclusive right to vomitory execration, a joyous duty to abominate; passions that, as a matter of internal tradition, they incessantly denounce in their opponent (or in those whom they consider such), but that, with time, wreak havoc upon them so much more than the latter. It is those who talk most of hatred that feel it most intensely. They reproach you for yours with a face and language ravaged by theirs. “Every anticommunist is a dog,” as the famous saying goes. Every anti-antiracist is a pit-bull, a worse-than-dog, a less-than-dog, a hyena, a worm, the proverbial Foul Beast.
He notes that while the anticommunist was a monster because he blithely accepted ‘inequality’ or people’s misery and profited from their exploitation, for the anti-antiracist, things are far simpler: ‘even clearer, even more contemptible’.
It must first be said that he is obviously not an anti-antiracist. To call him such would be to give him far too much credit; he is just a racist. And of course, with a few rare exceptions (lost souls who no longer have anything to lose), no one wants to be a racist, with the result that antiracism has as it were no enemies who dare accept the label as their own.
This has of course been noted before, usually understood in terms of ‘cancel culture’ or the like, but I would like to draw attention to the way Camus lingers on antiracism’s terminological sleight-of-hand, because it is characteristic of how he approaches almost all things, and then I would like to turn to Camus’ answer to the question we are inevitably left with: how then, do we voice our objection to antiracism?
First, Camus considers antiracism’s terminological sleight-of-hand one of the secrets of its power in that it is how it establishes its invulnerability, ‘and, dare, one say, uncriticizability’, and how it manages to become a dogma and a tool of power, and then, as we certainly see today, an industry hell bent on expansion, which in antiracism’s case involves indefinitely extending the range of things to be admitted under the designation of racist.
But to the sleight-of-hand, that antiracism makes racists of really anyone who is not an antiracist. This is how Camus’ wrestles with the terminological thorn:
I trust I will be forgiven, but I see no other way out of this tete-a-tete between racism and antiracism than what I have elsewhere called, following Barthes, bathmology, the (Barthesian) “science of levels of language,” which allows us to pass from a second to a third level and makes it clear that not every expression of opposition to antiracism or the abuses of its power is to be put in the same bag. While racism and anti-antiracism may very well occupy the same structural position vis-à-vis antiracism at times, they do not so at the same level of the spiral of meaning and should in no way be conflated. The distance between one (racism) and the other (antiracism’s double) is even greater than that separating each of them from antiracism. And the road that separates them can only be travelled (but to what end?) by way of anti-racism. Yet putting everything in the same bag is precisely where antiracism most excels. And it would not at all be surprising if only a language-centred, semantic, semiotic approach should be capable of untangling what is above all a confusion of language, skilfully maintained if not deliberately created.
In this domain, the meaning of words is so twisted, so vague, and in general so improper that there is nothing easier than to make them mean what we want them to mean and to make them serve every tyranny, even if that of course means disguising them - but this child’s play - as counter-tyrannies.
How do we object to antiracism without being ‘racist’? Camus and Jean Genet
So, to the question: how then, do we voice our objection to antiracism? Or phrased differently, how do we deal with the fact that when we oppose antiracism we are deemed, by definition in this brave new world, a thoroughly wretched being?
Camus considers that it is possible that this is the price of freedom, and we can see now that we are reading the author of Tricks as well as a Barthesian:
It is possible that this is the price of their freedom, a sort of byproduct of their ignominy. Thus, the only true opponents of sexual repression when it was at the height of its power were “morally lost” individuals, as one used to say – if they dared defy it, it was uniquely because, having renounced all morality along with all dignity, they ran no risk of falling even lower than they already had. It was unknown whether they were sexually free because they were thieves, liars, traitors, informers, and murderers or if they were all these things because they were homosexuals, adulterers, perverts, paedophiles, aficionados of group sex, and Stakhanovites of pleasure. Having granted themselves the freedom to lead their sexual lives as they so wished, they believed they had in this way broken through the moral wall separating good from evil, confusing the exercise of this freedom they had won, entirely by their own weakness, with their other depravities. Too often, and in a similar way, the only people who openly oppose antiracism are racists, as antiracism itself claims. As long as this remains the case, antiracism has nothing to fear.
For, as long as there are only racists to challenge it, the power of antiracism is absolutely unshakeable. It is a little as if, in the case of sexual repression, only child rapists were to rebel against its reign, principle, and injustices. And indeed, antiracism is perfectly aware of this fact, and this is why it has nothing more pressing to do than describe as racist anyone who raises the least objection to it or asks it embarrassing or displeasing questions.
The problem, of course, is that the definition of ‘racism’ has expanded beyond the definition of an assault, be that a violent action or a violent opinion. But I also note that Camus does not suggest that we become criminal vagabonds or racists and that one reason he holds this position is that criminals falsely believe that it is possible to break through the moral wall that separates good from evil, and that to do so, or to operate outside of society, is to ‘win’ freedom.
His philosophical position is the same when he writes on homosexuality and I cannot help but contrast him here with Jean Genet, that other, far more famous, gay writer. Genet was also a real criminal, and he wrote the magisterial Our Lady of the Flowers while he was in prison. One of the most important existentialist works, Sartre worshiped Genet—quite seriously, he wrote a book Saint Genet; Actor and Martyr—and as the philosophy goes, especially in its more radical forms, Genet performs a transvaluation of all values. In Our Lady of the Flowers betrayal becomes the highest moral value and murder an act of virtue and sexual appeal. As such, Genet would have absolutely no problem with racism, he would reveal in being condemned a racist. He is the exemplary ‘lost soul’. This is consistent with his philosophy, and he sees homosexuality in the same light. “The secret of homosexuality”, Sartre tells us of Genet’s choice to be one, is that “it elects to be a crime. Not only because it is ‘against nature,’ but because it is imaginary. The homosexual is not an idle dreamer: he is an impostor, a faker.”
For Camus, so too is the anti-antiracist when he is a real racist. That is, when he objects to antiracism with racism in its proper definition as an assault, be that a violent action or a violent opinion. If we consider the homosexual condemned like the anti-antiracist – that is morally condemned – the question of how to be an anti-antiracist without operating outside of society (a false freedom according to Camus) is the same question the homosexual faces and Camus’s answer to both is to take away the ideology of antiracism’s monopoly on morality. When Camus writes that antiracism has a monopoly on hate, he is also saying that it has a monopoly on morality.
We find Camus’ opinion of Genet’s representations of homosexuality in Notes Achriennes where he writes that they “too much resemble the one imagined and depicted by his worst enemies”. In a striking contrast, rather than Genet’s eager acceptance of homosexuality as Evil and himself thus defined as Evil, a ‘lost soul’ Camus writes that “Homosexuality has nothing to do with Evil. It is not a provocation…. Quite simply, it just is. It is on the side of pleasure, joy, amusement, affection, and—if we must, we must—love”. As such, his homosexual writings are not those of a criminal, but of a homosexual honnête homme. As Lawrence R. Schehr writes of Tricks:
Camus’s stories of sexual escapades are told as if there were nothing, but absolutely nothing, wrong with sex, and a fortiori with homosexual sex. There is no apology, nor is there any titillation. These are simple stories simply told…. This book is a series of narrated incidents unframed by the generic constraints of the confessional genre…. Missing are the posturing of John Rechy’s Numbers, the narcissism of pornography in general, the politics of betrayal of Jean Genet, and the confessional, apologetic, or explanatory modes of Proust and Gide. Never disguising its own comfortable amorality, Tricks is a text pleased with itself.
In a similar way, Camus’s answer to the dilemma: how do we deal with the fact that when we oppose antiracism, we are deemed thoroughly wretched beings? Is simply, remember that we are not. Why should the antiracists have some monopoly on morality? What could be more graciously defiant?
Renaud Camus “conspiracy theorist and white nationalist”, I think not. Renaud Camus “homosexual, anti-antiracist, honnête homme” is a better fit.
Renaud Camus’ message for us, and for the French today in particular
As for what Camus would prescribe for the rest of us—and indeed for the French today— he has this to say:
I do not for my part believe in a conspiracy. I do not believe, for example, that certain people, for the sole purpose of establishing an antiracist society or allowing one to be established, consciously willed the death of culture and deliberately planned its demise - by, for example, destroying the education system…No, I do not believe that. I do not believe in anything so carefully decreed […] What I do know by contrast, and this time with certainty, is that a living culture, in the full sense of the term, would never have tolerated the triumph of antiracism in the form and meaning it has taken among us. A people who knows itself — let us say “who knows its classics,” to keep it brief—such a people does not accept death because that is what is asked of it, does not consent to its disappearance so as to be reborn emptied of itself, does not resign itself to being melted down which retains nothing more than name and that — yet one more humiliation— for only a time. A people who knows its language, who knows its literature, who remembers its civilisation, and who preserves in its midst a cultivated class, elites (though certainly not in the pathetic sense the new masters have given this word), such a people does not let itself be led to the scaffold without a fight, nor for that matter meekly let itself be told that it is not a people, that it never was one.
LS
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Thank you Lana for another well researched and excellently expressed article. The brass tacks and bottom line of when we look at the human condition or even how we behave humans cannot exist without stories because we are compulsive communicators?Of course I would love to send you something so that you could buy yourself a beverage and sit outside one of the many street cafes and contemplate your next writing…….if only I knew how to do it🤔……….